Seventh Grade in the Life of Me, Penelope

by Alison Pollet

  And someone was wearing a mask. But who?

  “This is a clock, but it’s also art,” explained his mother, skimming her finger along the clock’s surface. “It’s a very famous piece made by George Nelson, the designer. It’s called the Sunburst Clock.”

  Oh, Monica was wearing a mask! But the weird thing was, when she took the mask off … she wasn’t Monica. She was someone else. But who?

  Nathaniel had many questions: “But how do you tell the seconds, and why is it orange?”

  No! It couldn’t be!

  “How come Fred Something gave you a gift? It’s not your birthday, Mommy.”

  Monica was …

  “Is it Hanukkah already?”

  Oh, my god.

  “Am I going to get a gift? ’Cause I want Mattel Electronic Baseball.”

  Penelope thought she might puke.

  Instead, she put her hands on her hips, stared at her little brother, and yelled, “Who cares what you want? And who cares about a dumb clock?!” The words “dumb clock” stuck in her throat like she’d swallowed a grape whole.

  Nathaniel dropped his car to the floor, its wheels still turning as it took a sad jolt forward. “Sorry,” he whispered.

  “A Sunburst Clock is just ‘a dumb clock,’ ” repeated Mrs. Schwartzbaum in a slow and punishing tone.

  Penelope didn’t have to look up to know that Carlos, Jenny, and her mother were looking at her. She could feel it! The six adult eyes burned into her, and she shuffled from foot to foot. She hadn’t meant to call it a dumb clock, at least not out loud.

  “I’m not sure how to account for that bizarre outburst, Penelope,” said her mother. “I’ll just assume you’re tired.” She turned away from her daughter and resumed talking in a chipper clip: “Oh, Carlos, Jenny, while you’re both here. I wanted to let you know I’m having a tea Saturday. Carlos, if you’re not on duty, can you tell whoever is? And, Jenny, I was wondering if you might want to serve. If not, I could ask the housekeeper. But if you want extra cash, I’d pay you hourly.”

  She turned back to Penelope. “Oh, and Penelope, I forgot to mention that a classmate of yours is coming. Her name is Cass. A new girl. Do you know her? She’s accompanying her grandmother, Bea Levin. You know, the famous art collector? Perhaps I mentioned that she’s a friend of Fred’s. She has this giant modern sculpture garden.”

  Penelope tried to explain to her mother about The Pledge and how she wasn’t supposed to talk to new kids, but Mrs. Schwartzbaum looked at her like she was talking gibberish and swung the conversation back to Bea Levin and her magnificent collection, which just might be as good as the Whitney’s.

  My Dream About Fred Something

  By Penelope B. Schwartzbaum

  Rick/Fred Something and Dr. Monica Quartermaine are wearing white doctors’ coats. Also, green surgery uniforms like the ones on M*A*S*H. (I think they call them scrubs.) Rick/Fred Something reaches into the pocket of his white coat. He’s got a velvet box. He gives it to Monica. Inside is this weird pocket watch like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland has, only with diamonds. Rick/Fred Something says something dumb, like: “We’ll always have time.” Then Monica says: “We’ll be together forever.” “You mean you’re leaving Alan?” asks Rick/Fred Something. “Yes,” says Monica.

  Rick/Fred Something leans in to kiss Monica. There’s all this dumb music. He gets closer and closer and then it’s so weird but Monica is wearing a surgical mask (like the doctors wear on M*A*S*H). Rick/Fred Something goes to untie it, and underneath the mask MONICA’S NOT MONICA. SHE’S MY MOM!!!!!!!

  Penelope once heard her father say that a movement was successful when the backlash against it began. Well, then Annabella and Pia had something to be proud about, because a backlash against The Pledge — in the form of tiny little messages graffiti-ed in bathroom stalls around the school — was underway. Some messages were straight to the point:

  Some were a slightly more subtle:

  Seventh graders were discussing the messages almost as much as they were discussing Annabella’s bat mitzvah and Tillie’s parents’ horrific divorce.

  Penelope, Stacy, Vicki, and Tillie arrived on the second floor of Gritzfield Hall to find Annabella and Pia, flanked by Lillian and Annie, officiating outside the girls’ bathroom. The way Annabella greeted them reminded Penelope of her uncle’s wedding when the bride stood at the end of a receiving line and accepted kisses and congratulations from guests. Annabella wore a periwinkle sweater that gave her blue eyes a cloudy look, like jeans that had been accidentally bleached. “Hi, you guys,” she chirped. “You’re not gonna believe this one!” If Annabella was a leader besieged, well, she wasn’t really acting like one — she seemed positively pleased by the turn of events.

  Stacy and Vicki shoved their way past the swell of seventh graders, taking Penelope and Tillie with them. There, in the third stall, written on the wall in chunky black script, it said:

  “Whoa,” said Stacy.

  “Wow,” said Vicki.

  “Ha!” Tillie laughed under her breath, then covered it with a cough.

  Annabella had gone to class, but Pia lingered outside the bathroom, chewing angrily on a pencil and staring deliberately at her clipboard. “Who do you think it is, Pia?” asked Stacy.

  Pia’s lips were covered in bits of yellow pencil, and she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I don’t know, but I’m gonna find out,” she answered.

  “Some new kid, I’m sure,” mumbled Vicki.

  “I think it might be a bunch of new kids,” suggested Stacy.

  “Why?” asked Pia, sticking out her tongue to see if there was pencil on it.

  “Lots of different handwriting,” answered Stacy. “Also, think about it: Nobody we know would write on the walls.”

  They stood pondering this.

  Pia put her tongue back in her mouth. “Yeah, well, whoever’s doing it, they’re gonna regret it. This is a really big deal.”

  “I’ve decided. Rick and Monica are gonna get married.”

  Stacy clicked off the television, punctuating her announcement with a burst of static. Tillie, Vicki, and Penelope had gone to Stacy’s house after school, and they’d just watched the episode of General Hospital where Alan Quartermaine learned about Rick and Monica’s affair.

  Vicki didn’t think this sounded right. “You mean you think she’s going to divorce Alan?”

  “Yeah, why not?”

  “Monica would never divorce Alan.”

  “Why?”

  “She’d have to move out of the mansion. That’s why.”

  “I don’t think Monica would stay married for money. She’ll move out for love.”

  Vicki, playing the sensitive friend, shot Stacy an important stare as if to say they shouldn’t talk about this stuff around Tillie. So they changed the subject. They started talking about boyfriends.

  “I just feel so abnormal not having one,” moaned Vicki.

  “I know,” said Stacy. “My stepsister has a boyfriend, and she’s nine! I’m in seventh grade! It’s not normal.”

  Penelope wondered: Does Stacy want a boyfriend because she’s normal or because it’s normal to want a boyfriend. Is there a difference?

  Vicki and Stacy talked about curly hair versus straight hair on boys and whether it was better for boys to like sports or video games and did collecting baseball cards automatically make you a nerd? And what about liking Star Trek?

  Penelope lay on the white shag rug in the middle of Stacy’s floor and listened to this conversation as if she were lying on a towel in the middle of a crowded beach. She could hear fragments of sentences and select words — pathetic, pitiful — mingling with the hum of Bernice’s vacuum cleaner. It wasn’t until Stacy stood over her and shouted, “ARE YOU ALIVE?” that Penelope realized an hour had gone by, Vicki and Tillie had gone home for dinner, and somehow she was lying facedown on the shag rug.

  “You gotta go, space case. My dad’s in town and he’s taking me out to dinner. Sheesh, for a se
cond I thought you were dead!”

  “Hi, Pen,” said Shirley Commack, who was walking in when Penelope was walking out. “You okay? You look out of it. Is my daughter on a college kick again? That stuff will fry your brains. If I were you, I’d just ignore it.”

  When Penelope exited the black iron gates of Stacy’s building, she discovered Tillie Warner waiting for her. It was dark out, and under the streetlamp Tillie’s hair glowed like an orange highlighter. Her green eyes were rimmed with red.

  “Are you crying?” asked Penelope.

  “No, allergies,” wheezed Tillie. She pointed to the Christmas tree display on the corner; it was only November, but you could already buy a tree on several major cross streets. “Those give me asthma.”

  They stood silently for a moment. Penelope looked from the trees to Tillie to the sidewalk. Was that a Moe Was Here next to the fire hydrant? She took a step closer to check it out.

  “What are you doing?” asked Tillie.

  “Looking to see if Moe was here.”

  “Moe’s crazy,” sniffled Tillie, who, despite being from the Upper East Side, knew about the Upper West Side’s most notorious graffiti artist. Then she added inexplicably, “But I don’t mean crazy in a bad way.”

  What Penelope had thought was a Moe turned out to just be a scratch. “I didn’t wait around to look for Moes,” Tillie told her. “I want to talk to you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  The Christmas trees formed a tunnel on Seventy-ninth Street, and inside, the air was thick with pine. Four white sneakers sloshed along the wet sidewalk flecked with green needles, like white boats crossing a dark river covered in algae.

  When she could breathe again, Tillie got right to the point. “Being best friends with someone is like being married,” she said. “Have you ever thought that?”

  Penelope told her she hadn’t.

  “One person’s the boss, and the other is the follower. It’s just like my parents. My dad was — I mean is, he is — this big bully, and my mom did everything he said.” She corrected herself. “I mean does, does everything he says.”

  They stopped at a red light.

  “I used to ask her why she didn’t stick up for herself. Guess what she said? That she couldn’t be bothered! That it was too much work! Isn’t that pathetic?”

  Penelope wondered if she should nod and agree that Tillie’s mom was pathetic. That might seem rude.

  “It took, well, it took” — Tillie rolled up the sleeve of her coat to scratch a strawberry-sized collection of tiny red bumps on her wrist — “let’s just say it took a lot for her to finally stick up for herself. He cheated on her, you know? Had an affair!”

  “Like Rick and Monica on General Hospital,” said Penelope.

  Tillie scratched until the bumps were bloody “Yeah, but Monica’s a lot prettier than Rochelle. That’s his” — she sucked on her finger, then spat out the word as if it were poison — “girlfriend. My mom waited so long to tell off my dad, he and Rochelle were practically doing it in her face. You know, he was buying Rochelle all these gifts and putting them on the credit card. He never bought my mom gifts!”

  An image of the Sunburst Clock erupted in Penelope’s head. She rubbed her eyes with her mittened hands as if that would get rid of it.

  “Can you keep a secret?” Tillie asked Penelope. “You promise you won’t tell anybody? Not even Stacy? I’m gonna ask Pia to cross my name off The Pledge. If Vicki doesn’t want to be my best friend and Annabella disinvites me from her dumb bat mitzvah, I don’t care. I’m having one next year and I just won’t invite her. I won’t invite any of them.”

  They reached the corner of Eighty-sixth Street, and it was as if the walk had strengthened Tillie. With every block, she got more and more determined. She crossed her arms across her chest and stared purposefully at Penelope. “The way I see it, there are leaders and there are followers and then there’s us. We’re not even followers. We’re followers of followers. And you know what that makes us?”

  Penelope shook her head.

  “Nobody,” answered Tillie. “It makes us nobody.”

  The crosstown bus skidded to the curb. “If it doesn’t bug you, then sorry I said anything. If it does bug you, well …” The doors to the bus opened.

  “Hey, Tillie!” Penelope called out, because the idea had just struck her. “You don’t know who wrote the stuff on the walls, do you?”

  Tillie climbed a step. She turned and peered down at Penelope. She was having fun now, and her top lip curled into a snaky smile. “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t,” she teased.

  A gust of wind blew between them.

  “All I can say,” added Tillie mysteriously, “is, the person writing on the walls is brave. Crazy, maybe. But brave.”

  The doors closed, and the bus began to move.

  Penelope wove her way home, past men and women hulking with grocery bags and shopping carts. She swerved past a sobbing child beating the sidewalk with his fists, a pack of yapping white dogs mashed together in a tangle of leashes.

  She thought: These are my feet that are walking. These are my hands jammed in my pockets. These are my fingertips touching coins and lint. This is my thumb pressing into a wad of gum. I chewed that gum. I spit it out. I put it in a wrapper. I put it in my pocket. I’m what’s walking down the street. I’m what’s taking me home. AM I NOBODY?

  The next day, a new message appeared in the gym locker room. It said:

  “I don’t get it,” said Vicki.

  “It’s hard to read at first,” said Stacy.

  “Is it a poem?” asked Annabella.

  “No,” said Tillie. “It’s a puzzle, an anagram. Read what’s on the right side of the equals sign first. Then, look at the left. If you read that column going down, it says, ‘NO NEWKS.’ ”

  “Oh, yeah,” they said as a chorus.

  “How’d you figure that out so fast, Tillie?” asked Pia.

  Tillie whipped her head around. “What’s that supposed to mean, Pia?”

  Pia tapped her pencil against her clipboard. “What? I can’t ask a question, Tillie?”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “Well, you act like it’s a crime!”

  The five-minute warning bell clanged, and Annabella took it as an opportunity to have the last word. “The point is,” she calmly intoned, “whoever is doing it will get in huge trouble. Not just with us, but with the school. Graffiti is a really big deal.”

  They headed to class.

  My Dream About Stacy and the Rope Ladder By Penelope B. Schwartzbaum

  Stacy and I used to go to her country house for two weeks every summer (when her dad and mom were together). There was a rope ladder in the playground nearby, the kind that hangs between two trees. Stacy climbed it every day, and I hated it. (It was boring and it hurt my hands!) Anyway, in the dream, we’re on the first rung of the rope ladder. We’re about to swing to the second one, and a crazy wind hits. The rope starts shaking.

  “Keep going!” screams Stacy. But I can’t. I fall and fall and fall and then I land in this squishy mound of brown dirt. Except it’s not a mound, it’s a pit. I’m in a hole below the earth. (I think we learned a fancy word for that in Earth Science, but I can’t remember it.) I keep calling, “Stacy!”

  I can barely see her. She’s a little speck moving along a rope ladder.

  I try to pull myself out, but the walls keep crumbling in my hands. And then I realize I’m not alone. There are lions in the pit! They’re baby lions, they’re so cute! But wait! Cubs still bite! I’m going to die! I scream to Stacy, but she’s gone. She made it to the end. No one sees me! There’s hot lion breath on my neck. I can feel whiskers on my shoulder. Then I wake up.

  Herbert and Denise Schwartzbaum had a tendency to argue for the first couple of days after one of Herbert’s business trips, and on Saturday morning, after a restless night of sleep, Penelope woke up to sounds of her parents bickering.

  “Denise, please,
why are you starting?”

  “I’m not starting. You’re the one who’s starting.”

  The digital clock blinked at her: 8:31 A.M. She mashed her face into the pillow. Maybe she could sleep for just a little bit more.

  Mr. Schwartzbaum had returned from Portugal the night before with gifts: a collector’s doll for her, a train set for Nathaniel, and chocolates, olive oil, and a tablecloth for her mother. The first thing he’d done upon entering the apartment — Carlos trailing behind him with his bags — was point at the Sunburst Clock. “What the hell is that?” he fumed. When Mrs. Schwartzbaum explained, he shook his head and sighed. “If that’s art, then …” Herbert Schwartzbaum was such a busy man, he often didn’t complete his sentences.

  “Can we just not do this right now?”

  “We can just not do anything right now.”

  Penelope mashed her face harder into the pillow until her nose hurt. I’ll just stay this way until it stops, she thought. I’ll just stay this way forever, she thought.

  But forever had only just begun when feet scraped into her room. Nathaniel’s footy pajamas made him look like one of Dr. Seuss’s Sneetches — or was it a Who? Penelope couldn’t remember — and gave his footsteps a sandpapery sound as they scratched the wood floor.

  “What?” said Penelope into the pillow.

  “Can I watch The Smurfs in here?”

  “What’s wrong with your TV?”

  “Channel 7 has lines in it.”

  “I need to study for —” Penelope started to say when a door slammed down the hall. She lifted up her head and motioned for her brother to come in.

  “Denise, cut me a break for once. Please. I’m barely off the airplane.”

  “You’re barely off the airplane and you’re barely back on. What else is new? And please don’t expect me to feel sorry for you. You’re off gallivanting in Europe while I’m home with the kids.”