Penpal

by Dathan Auerbach

  We marched single-file out of the back door of the classroom and into the courtyard outside. Keeping our formation, we pressed our backs against the wall of the building so that we could pose for a group photograph. One of the students, a boy named Chris, had become so excited upon exiting the classroom that, as soon as he saw the sky above, he let his balloon go and started cheering. I think this enthusiasm would have spread quickly if the teacher had been a little slower in scolding him.

  “Now you’re going to be the only one in the picture without a balloon, Chris,” she snapped.

  The boy started to cry. He had a sore throat, so his complaints were hoarse and raspy. I remember thinking that he sounded funny, and I suppose there’s some justice in the fact that I caught his sore throat a couple days later. I would like to say that in a demonstration of solidarity at least one other student let a balloon go, or even better, that we all let ours go and stood by Chris, balloonless and proud. But this was kindergarten. Most of the kids stood there with restrained amusement, while others advertised just how funny they found Chris’ plight. In the end, Chris sulked at the very edge of the group picture and held his left hand out of frame, clutching an imaginary balloon with a frown etched so firmly in his face that it seemed like it might just outlast the lifetime of the picture that he was posing for.

  After the photo was taken, we formed a circle around the teacher who said a few things about friendship and community that I imagine went mostly unheard by the students whose attention was now myopically focused on loosening the grip on their balloons’ tethers. When her speech was finally over, the countdown began.

  FIVE …

  FOUR …

  THREE …

  TWO …

  … ONE AND A HALF …

  There was a collective groan in protest; she did this frequently. Although we didn’t know what this number was, we knew that it was a way of stalling.

  ONE!

  All at once, each kid yelled whatever their chosen launch word was, and the courtyard became a carnival as two dozen brightly colored floating balls filled the sky. We ran chasing our balloons and tried desperately to distinguish them from other ones of the same color. Crosscurrents and updrafts flung the balloons wildly in different directions, and their human counterparts mirrored their movements on the ground below. Several kids collided with one another as they ran frantically chasing their balloons, but instead of fights, there were laughs.

  Despite the ruckus, I heard a rogue “BLAST OFF!” and shot my eyes down from the sky to see Chris releasing a bright green balloon that the teacher had just given him so that he could participate. As the balloons reached ever-upwards, it became almost impossible to track my own balloon, and this brought with it a new kind of excitement. Where would it go? Who would find it? I remember that day so clearly. When I think about it, I can almost feel a phantom sun on my face and can sometimes, just faintly, smell my teacher’s perfume. It was one of the happiest days that I had ever had.

  Over the next couple of weeks, the letters started to roll in. Most of the notes came, as requested, with pictures of different landmarks, and the teacher would pin each picture on the big wall-map that we had taken our Polaroids in front of. Arranging them directly on the map made it easy to see where the letter had come from and just how far the balloon had traveled. We did this at the very beginning of class each day, which was a really smart idea because we actually looked forward to coming to school to see if our letters had come in.

  For the duration of the year, we would have one day a week where we could write back to our penpal, or another students’ penpal, in case our letter had not come in yet. Day after day, I arrived at school excited but left dejected at the fact that my letter hadn’t arrived yet. There were other students who didn’t receive letters either – not every balloon would be found, and this was something the teacher had reminded us of frequently – but this fact didn’t offer me any consolation. I worried that all my hard work would have been for nothing, and I started to resign myself to the idea that I would have to write to one of my peers’ penpals if I wanted to have anyone to write to at all.

  But then one day it came.

  My letter was one of the last to arrive. Upon entering the classroom, I looked at my desk and saw that, once again, there was no letter waiting for me, but as I sat down, the teacher approached me and asked me about the letter I had written. She asked me if I remembered what I had sent away with the balloon. I was a bit taken aback, but I told her about what I wrote, and about the dollar, and about the drawing. When I finished, she brought her hand from behind her back and said with a smile, “I think this is for you, then.”

  I was delirious with excitement, and my confusion regarding her questions about the letter I had sent ended when I saw the envelope. On the back, right over the seal, there was a drawing of a stick figure holding a balloon – just like the one I had drawn. The letter really was for me.

  I must have looked ecstatic, because as I was about to open it, she put her hand on mine to stop me and said, “Please don’t be upset.” I didn’t understand what she meant – why would I be upset now that my letter had come? I was mystified that she would even know what was in the envelope, but of course, I know now that she had screened the contents to make sure there was nothing obscene. But sitting at that desk, I was baffled by her concern that I would be disappointed. My balloon hadn’t gotten lost. The person who found it hadn’t just thrown my letter away. All other possible details seemed negligible and insignificant to me. But when I opened the envelope, I understood her reaction.

  There was no letter.

  The only thing in the envelope was a Polaroid, but I couldn’t make out what the image was. It looked like a patch of desert, but it was too blurry to decipher; it appeared as if the camera had been moved while the picture was being taken. I turned the Polaroid over, but there was nothing on the back. It was just a Polaroid and nothing more. There wasn’t even a return address. I realized that I wouldn’t be able to write back, and since there was no way to tell where the picture was taken, it couldn’t even be placed anywhere on the map. Instead, my teacher tacked it on the side of the map next to the compass rose – out of the way, but still a part of the project. I was crushed.

  When I got home, my mom asked me how my day was, and so I told her. I told her I had gotten a letter from my penpal, and she became visibly excited. I think she had always known that I might never get a response, and as time went on and my potential contact remained silent, her consolations shifted from optimism in possibility and potential to realism and acceptance. So, when I actually received something, she was both shocked and overjoyed for me since she knew how badly I had wanted someone to write me back. When I told her that there was no letter, only a Polaroid, she joked that maybe my penpal had bad handwriting and was embarrassed after seeing how good mine was. I didn’t think that this was actually the case; my letter had been damaged before it even touched the sky. But my mother’s words always seemed to have the ability to make me feel better, so I accepted her rationale, and I felt happy that I had gotten anything at all.

  The school year pressed on, and the letters had stopped coming for nearly all of the other students; after all, you can only continue a written correspondence with a kindergartener for so long. This was expected by the teacher, and the lull was worked into the curriculum – our Friday letter-writing sessions slowly morphed into other projects, and everyone, including myself, had lost interest in the letters almost completely. I still thought about the picture from time to time. In some way, I still felt as if I had been cheated, but then again, there were students who had received nothing at all because their balloons had apparently been lost or disregarded. Recognizing this, I realized that I would seem greedy to those kids, and so any time I felt compelled to complain, I would bite my tongue. Gradually, I internalized this pretended acceptance and simply moved on both in appearance and thought – until I got another envelope.

  My excitement was
rejuvenated fully, and I secretly reveled in the fact that I had just gotten a letter while nearly all of the other penpals had abandoned their involvement. Most of my classmates had written back and forth with their penpals several times, and the ones who received nothing at all were probably the victims of bad weather and bad luck. The first envelope I had received, however, was tantamount to someone laughing in my face; it seemed as if someone had gone through just enough trouble to let me know that he didn’t care. Holding the correspondence in my hand validated my objections to the original arrival. It made sense that I received another delivery – there had been nothing but a blurry picture in the first one – this was probably to make up for that.

  But again, there was no letter at all … just another picture.

  This one was more distinguishable, but not fully comprehensible. The camera was sharply angled toward the sky. The photograph caught the top corner of a building in the bottom left of the frame, but the rest of the image was distorted by a lens-flare from the sun. I turned the Polaroid over, but again there was nothing written on the back. My teacher put her hand on my shoulder and said, “A picture’s worth a thousand words, right?” before walking away toward her desk.

  “A picture’s worth a thousand words …” I had never heard that said before, and I sat there for a while trying to decide if I believed it.

  Because the balloons didn’t travel very far, and because they were all launched on the same day, the board became a bit cluttered fairly quickly. If a letter came in with a picture of a place that wasn’t already overrepresented on the map, it would be displayed, but otherwise the correspondences were distributed to their recipients, so we could take them home as keepsakes of the project. A week or two before the school year ended, the remaining pictures were taken off the map and handed out to their owners. My best friend Josh took home the second highest number of pictures at the end of the year – his penpal was very cooperative and sent him photographs from all around the neighboring city; Josh took home, I think, four Polaroids.

  I took home nearly fifty.

  The envelopes had all been opened by the teacher, but after a while I had stopped even looking at the pictures. However, the photographs were, if nothing else, a collection, and so I saved them in one of my dresser drawers that housed my other collections. The problem with collections, I had found, was that either there was simply no way to gather all the things in a series because there was no end to it, or there would always be that last item that made your collection incomplete. In my mind, I suppose, the things in the collection weren’t as valuable as the completeness of the collection itself.

  My drawer was a mausoleum of my incomplete collections of rocks, baseball cards, comic book cards, and little miniature baseball batting helmets that my mother and I would ceremoniously buy from a vending machine at Winn-Dixie after T-Ball games. I put the photos in a box and slid it next to my baseball cards. With the school year over and summer break just beginning, I turned my attention to other things.

  For Christmas, midway through my year of kindergarten, my mom had gotten me a small snow cone machine. It didn’t make very good snow cones, but the fact that I could make them at home now delighted both Josh and me. He came to covet the machine so much that his parents bought him a slightly nicer one for his birthday, toward the end of the school year. The snow cones produced by Josh’s machine were much bigger and were made much faster than when we would use my machine.

  Several weeks into the summer break, we decided to take a break from exploring the woods; we would pool our resources and set up a snow cone stand to make money. We thought we would make a fortune selling snow cones at one dollar.

  Josh and I lived in different neighborhoods, so we had a conversation about where we would set up shop. As one might have expected, we both wanted to locate the business at our respective houses, so before we even had the cups for the shaved ice, we had our first disagreement.

  His neighborhood was a bit nicer than mine, but many of the older houses in my neighborhood had slightly larger yards, and as such, the people who actually cared for them had to be outside for longer amounts of time in order to do so. There were also simply more people in my neighborhood, since there were many houses that stood on fairly small plots of land, and the ongoing construction around where I lived meant that there were always people outside on the weekends.

  Josh rebutted by claiming that his neighborhood was nicer than mine was, and this was a thought that had never occurred to me before. I became indignant, and our capacities to engage in a civil and rational discussion became exhausted. Ultimately, I won by trumping all of Josh’s legitimate reasons by exclaiming that it was my idea, and so we would do it at my house.

  The first weekend was a disaster. We had both used our machines before, but to be quite honest, we simply weren’t very good snow cone producers. We had two bottles of syrup: cherry and cherry, so there wasn’t to be much variety in terms of flavors. More to our detriment, we had never completely figured out how best to pour the syrup onto the ice, or how much to pour for that matter, so most of our customers had their hands covered in overflowing red dye when they squeezed the paper cups to take their snow cones away. We made about six dollars and stopped for the day.

  We didn’t fare much better the second weekend. Josh and I had gotten the hang of the syrup for the most part, but I had the idea that we should use crushed ice in the machines in order to make the snow cones more quickly, since I thought that smaller chunks of ice would shave faster. Instead, the crushed ice became jammed between the blades and the plastic rotor inside the machine and broke my snow cone maker immediately. This machine was one of the nicest things that I owned, and so I became flustered when I couldn’t get it to work.

  I took the top off and looked inside. I could see the chunks of ice that were jamming the blades, and so I picked up the plastic case and banged it on the table a few times in an attempt to dislodge them. Looking up, I could see a potential customer coming; I needed to clear the jam quickly. Without thinking, I pushed my hand down into the cavity of the snow cone machine and began carefully wrestling the ice out of the space between the blades and the inside wall. I looked up again, and I recognized the person from the weekend before – forgetting that Josh’s machine was working fine, I turned my attention back to the problem so that I would be ready for our first return customer.

  I could feel the ice begin to give and pivot a little as the heat from my fingers melted it. I almost had the problem resolved when I heard Josh say, “Hey, what’s this button do?”

  I looked over to Josh and saw that he had his finger on the start button of my machine. Reflexively, I yanked my hand out of my snow cone maker – my middle finger catching the blade on the way out. There was a period of just a few seconds where I thought that I had just scratched myself, but a thin red line soon began to quickly draw itself horizontally along the underside of my finger. I watched as that line widened and spread as blood began dripping from my hand.

  I shouted at Josh while he prepared a snow cone on his machine for our anticipated customer, and he said that he was only joking – that he wasn’t really going to push the button. He looked genuinely remorseful from what I could tell, though he seemed to have a problem looking at my hand as he apologized. I think now that Josh had a fear of blood.

  Josh had already finished pouring the syrup before the customer got to the table, and he held it gingerly so that it wouldn’t melt. Holding my finger with the opposite hand, I looked around for something to wrap it in. By the time the customer got to our stand, the blood had welled up in the tight fist that I was making around my finger and had begun dripping down my forearm.

  As Josh held the snow cone out to the man, I saw our patron’s eyes dart back and forth from the cherry-red ice to my blood-red hand. His expression changed from concern to amusement, and finally he said, “You boys sure have put a lot of yourself into the business!” The man followed this exclamation with a guffaw so long and l
oud that I could still hear it when I went back into the house to show my mom what I had done to myself. When I got back outside, Josh said that the man had bought the snow cone; we decided to quit while we were ahead, so we packed up and went inside.

  It turned out that my machine wasn’t irreparably damaged – once the ice melted, the jam was cleared, and it began to work again without difficulty. This was good news, because business picked up the following weekend. Josh and I had taken a substantial break from our explorations in the woods due to a patch of trees that blocked our path, and during that hiatus I made a new sign that said in big, bold letters: “FREE SNOW CONES!!” Josh said matter-of-factly that we weren’t just going to give snow cones away, and I laughed as I pointed at what I had written in faint pencil just under the advertisement: “just kidding.”

  My neighbor, an elderly woman named Mrs. Maggie, was our first customer that day. She pretended to be outraged by our ruse but happily paid us. Before she left, she told us that she would look for us in the lake later that day if we decided to go swimming. We had many more customers that day, and they were all good sports about our trick, including the man who returned for a third time. We made eighteen dollars that day and a little bit less the following weekend.

  The fifth weekend would turn out to be our last day of business; my mom would take my snow cone machine away only a couple days later. When I protested, she told me that she didn’t want me cutting my hand off, although I had injured myself weeks ago. Even at that age, I thought that this late reaction was bizarre.

  Because Josh and I both had a snow cone machine, we each had a separate stack of money that we put together into one pile, and we then split it evenly. When there was an odd number of bills, we would play “Paper, Rock, Scissors” to see who would get to keep the extra bill; we called this decision-making ritual “gaming.” That day we had made a total of seventeen dollars, primarily from the same people we had been selling to since we started our business. After we stopped selling for the day, Josh was divvying up the spoils, and as he paid out my fourth dollar, I was consumed by a feeling of profound bewilderment.