Seventh Grade in the Life of Me, Penelope

by Alison Pollet

  For dessert, a woman dressed like Heidi passed out meringues shaped like mushrooms from a big wicker basket, and a man with a big chef’s hat steered an enormous silver tray of strawberries dipped in chocolate. There was a cake, coconut white with ice blue frosting, in the shape of a giant cloud. When Annabella placed the knife on the icing, flashbulbs sparked, and her father raised a glass to toast: “May you always soar to new heights.”

  Penelope did all these things, saw all this happen. But were it not for the party favor — a T-shirt that said I WAS AT ANNABELLA’S BAT MITZVAH, 1982 — Penelope might not have remembered she’d been there.

  If there was a price to pay for all the ignoring Penelope had done, she wondered if living in a bubble was it. She wondered if all the little tricks she’d done to stop thinking had backfired; they’d been too tiring for her brain. Now she’d have to live like this forever.

  Would it be so bad?

  Had anything really changed?

  Nathaniel still sang; Jenny still played Elvis Costello; and Mrs. Schwartzbaum was still Mrs. Schwartzbaum: “Oh, Penelope, I got a call from your homeroom teacher — What’s her name, Dr. Alvin? — if you see her at school tomorrow, can you tell her I’m sorry I didn’t call her back? Fred and I were just so busy with our charity event. I’m sure it’s just some field trip for your class she’s calling about — right?”

  In some ways, the bubble made life easier. Like on the day after Annabella’s bat mitzvah, when Stacy called to ecstatically announce that she and Ben were the seventh grade’s first official couple. Penelope hadn’t needed to stop herself from thinking bad thoughts — if she even had them anymore.

  “How come you never mentioned Ben was in your Algebra class?” asked an outraged Stacy. “He says you won’t talk to him. He says you’re mean to him!”

  And when Penelope countered that she thought she wasn’t supposed to talk to him, because he was new, because of The Pledge, Stacy seemed mystified. How could she not have known? Didn’t she read the No Newks Newsletter? How could she not have heard? That there was one new boy who was okay? That it was Ben? Could Penelope really be that spacey? Could she really be that out of it? Just think — Stacy could have met Ben months ago if Penelope had been paying attention! If somewhere buried in Penelope there was a clever retort, she didn’t think to look for it.

  Shirley Commack picked up the other phone. “Oh hi, Penelope,” she said. “I miss you. We never see you anymore.” Then she asked Stacy to hang up so she could use the phone to call her editor.

  That same afternoon, Mr. Schwartzbaum departed for Cairo by way of Amsterdam and Paris. Since planning the upcoming charity event was so time-consuming for Mrs. Schwartzbaum, and she needed to be at the office over the weekend, she hired Jenny to come on Sunday evening.

  Penelope and Nathaniel played Boggle at the kitchen table while Jenny made dinner.

  “ ‘Erf ’ is not a word,” Penelope told her brother.

  “Jen-ny!” sang Nathaniel. “Is ‘erf ’ a word?”

  “Nathaniel, ‘erf ’ is not a word,” said Jenny. “Don’t be silly.”

  He slumped in his chair and bitterly scratched “erf ” from his word list.

  “Think you kids can manage not to kill each other over a game while I run to the supermarket? I’m making lasagna, and we’re out of tomato paste.” Jenny slipped one arm into her pearly white ski jacket and then the other, and said she’d be back in a few minutes.

  “If ‘erf ’ is not a word, then neither is ‘free,’ ” argued Nathaniel when Jenny closed the door to the apartment.

  “But ‘free’ is a word,” Penelope said, and sighed, putting a checkmark next to the word. She was winning twenty to one.

  “ ‘Free’ is not a word, ‘free’ is not a word, I don’t care, ‘free’ is not a word!” sang Nathaniel stupidly. He jumped up from the table and grabbed a head of garlic from the cutting board on the kitchen counter. He clutched it in his fist, waving his arms in the air in giant S-like swooshes.

  “I hate Boggle. Let’s play Space instead. Come on, Penelope! Whirrrr … wizzzzzzz! Look it’s a spaceship! An alien spaceship!”

  “You’ve been watching too much Star Trek,” said Penelope.

  “It’s USS Garlic!” whooped Nathaniel. “USS Garlic heading for Planet Garlic.” He did his best imitation of a walkie-talkie. “Come in, Planet Garlic. Come in, Planet Garlic!

  “Psssst, Penelope,” he instructed. “You’re supposed to say ‘Come in’ now. Say something like, ‘I hear you, Planet Garlic.’ Or, ‘Loud and clear, Planet Garlic.’ ”

  She ignored him.

  “Come on, Penelope!” he shouted. “Play!”

  He bounded over to her, arms swinging, dangling the garlic in front of her face. “I’m gonna hypnotize you into playing Planet Garlic!” He swung his fist back and forth like he’d seen hypnotists on cartoons do so many times before. “You are getting sleepy … sleepy …,” he gurgled. “You will play Planet Garlic with Nathaniel,” droned her brother. “You will play.…”

  And then Penelope did something peculiarly unlike her. She lifted her arm with a force she hadn’t known she could muster, and propelled it forward as if to punch — except she grabbed Nathaniel’s wrist instead. She squeezed as hard as she could until his silly, happy eyes started to water.

  She squeezed until — squealing with pain — his fist unclenched and the head of garlic dropped to the floor. With her brother’s eyes upon her, she held her foot above it — her once-gleaming-white Tretorn was now gray and scuffed and doodled upon — and brought her foot down with a brutal slam. Once, twice, three times, then four, stamping until the peel came undone and the head of garlic was no longer a head of garlic but lots of little cloves.

  What was it that finally pushed Penelope to be so cruel? Was it the itch of the garlic’s papery skin as it skimmed the tip of her nose? Was it the pungent stench that had clogged her nostrils? Was it Nathaniel’s unrelenting will to play?

  “Why’d you do that?” sobbed Nathaniel.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Penelope? Why’d you crush my spaceship?” he choked, dropping to his knees and searching the floor for the scattered cloves. “Now the Martians will have no way to get to Planet Garlic,” he snuffled.

  On any other day, the sight of the little boy — gently scooping a smashed clove of garlic into the palm of his hand as if it were a wounded bird — might have made Penelope feel sad. Guilty, too. But if she felt anything, it was from inside the bubble. The violent thumps of her sneaker had done nothing to make it burst.

  “Poor Martians,” moaned Nathaniel, “now you’re stuck here.”

  Penelope spent the rest of the night lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling, an activity interrupted only once — when the phone rang. She picked it up to hear a husky, faraway voice booming in the receiver: “Say what you mean!” blasted the voice.

  “Hello?” gulped Penelope.

  “Mean what you say!” the voice hollered.

  “Who is this?”

  “We know it was you!”

  The voice repeated the sentence. Over and over again: “Say what you mean. Mean what you say. We know it was you.” Penelope heard the click of a tape recorder and then Elvis Costello singing. Was that Elvis Costello singing? It was. “Didn’t they teach you anything except how to be cruel in that charm school?” went the song.

  If the callers had intended to talk, Penelope didn’t give them the chance. Shaking, she hung up, and when the phone rang again, she didn’t pick it up. “Let it ring! Don’t pick up!” she called to Jenny and Nathaniel. “It’s a wrong number!”

  The next morning she and Nathaniel waited for the school bus. The lobby smelled like lemon furniture polish and percolated Spanish coffee, and Nathaniel curled up on the leather sofa in a gentle doze. Penelope sat uneasily beside him. She didn’t have to be a detective to know the crank callers had been Tillie and Cass.

  She considered not going to school, spending th
e day looking for Moes. Maybe she’d go upstairs, tell her mother she was sick.

  She didn’t even get that far.

  It wasn’t like Mrs. Schwartzbaum to call attention to family troubles in public — that was something she called tacky — but here she was in the middle of the lobby, wearing the Japanese robe and slippers Mr. Schwartzbaum had bought her in Tokyo.

  “WELL, PENELOPE, GUESS WHO’S NOT GOING TO SCHOOL TODAY?”

  “Just a little bit wider, Pen, can ya?”

  Penelope stretched her mouth open until her jaw felt like it would pop. Dr. Lincoln pressed a silver wand against the inside of her cheek. “This will feel a little icy.…”

  Mrs. Schwartzbaum saw Penelope’s week-long suspension from school as an opportunity to get some overdue dentist’s appointments out of the way. Penelope needed several teeth pulled before she could get braces, and to Mrs. Schwartzbaum, minor oral surgery under general anesthesia seemed a fitting way for Penelope to see out her punishment.

  “Good girl,” said Dr. Lincoln. “Okay, so, you know that we’re gonna have to put you out to do the extractions. You’ll go to sleep for a bit. You might feel a bit hazy afterward, but trust me, it’ll go away.”

  “Okay,” said Penelope.

  “Being put to sleep isn’t pleasant, but it’s better than being in pain.”

  Dr. Lincoln said he’d be back in a bit, and Penelope waited, lying on a big gray chair in a small, white, windowless room, staring at a poster of a little girl with a twinkly-toothed smile. The poster said: HAPPY TEETH MAKE HAPPY KIDS!

  “I’m here to prep you for extractions,” hummed Bonnie, the dental hygienist. “Penelope, I know it’s a lot to ask, but do you think you could relax?”

  “Sorry,” said Penelope, trying to unclench her shoulder. It tensed more with Bonnie’s touch.

  “I don’t think the person about to have oral surgery should be apologizing!” laughed Bonnie. She inserted two metal tubes into Penelope’s mouth: one that sent cinnamon-scented water spurting against the inside of her back teeth, and another that sucked up Penelope’s spit like a vacuum. It made a shh shh sound and tickled the bottom of her tongue.

  She asked Penelope to bite down on a piece of canvas-covered plastic. It tasted like a combination of toothpaste, gas stations, and Barbie dolls. “Breathe out of your mouth, Penelope. Breathe into this.” Bonnie placed a canvas mask in front of Penelope’s face.

  Soon she was asleep.

  The last thing Penelope looked at before falling asleep was the poster of the girl, and the first thing she dreamed about were the girl’s teeth. They weren’t attached to the little girl any longer; they were floating in space, perfect and straight and white, against a black starless sky. There were hundreds of them. Tiny teeth whizzing in the darkness.

  And then the teeth became Boggle cubes. Each one had a letter. And the letters spelled words.

  P E N

  C R U E L

  N O B O D Y

  I G N O R E

  S T A T E M E N T

  B U B B L E

  M A T C H

  O P I N I O N

  Then all the cubes fell away until only one was left. O P I N I O N. The tiles bobbed up and down in the darkness like buoys, and then the P bobbed down and didn’t bob up again. Then the I. Until what remained of the word O P I N I O N was O N I O N.

  A word inside a word!

  And then there were onions. All kinds. Miniature pearl onions. White onions. Yellow onions. Red ones. Pink ones. And Penelope’s dream had gone from black and white to Technicolor. Now there was an entire solar system of vegetables: eggplants, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, carrot sticks and celery stalks and shining white heads of garlic.

  And there Penelope was. That was her, right? She’d never seen herself from a distance before. She was balancing like a surfer on top of an orange pepper. The air felt velvety against her arms as she leaped onto the squishy head of a mushroom. She bounced from the mushroom to the eggplant to the tomato to the squash, playing a wild game of vegetable hopscotch. She went around and around, until it was time to lie down. She arched her back over a head of garlic, so the blood rushed to her head and her feet dangled in the air. The world was quiet, and nothing was moving except her wiggly bare toes.

  When Penelope woke up, she was lying on a couch in one of Dr. Lincoln’s waiting rooms. Her face was flat against a white cotton pillow, and a nubby blanket was stretched over her. She reached to touch her lips; they felt blubbery and numb, like they didn’t belong to her. Her mouth tasted like salty cotton, and she reached inside to remove the blood-covered gauze scrunched against the gums where teeth had been.

  She opened her eyes to discover Nathaniel staring straight at her.

  “You’re awake,” he whispered. He’d been warned by Jenny to be as quiet as possible.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do your teeth hurt?”

  Penelope shook her head.

  “Oh, well, that’s good. You’re lucky. Jenny says all you’re gonna be able to eat is ice cream and you can get whatever kind you want.”

  Penelope nodded.

  “Well, what kind are you gonna get? If she lets you get two, can one of them be Rocky Road?”

  Penelope looked at her brother and wondered if maybe she was still dreaming. He looked different to her. Had he always had those freckles? Was his blond hair getting browner? As he pleaded the case for Rocky Road (It’s three flavors, not just one!), Penelope thought, I grow up, and so does he. It was a simple thought, and it came out sounding like one of the weird haiku poems they studied in sixth-grade English class; but at that moment, to Penelope, it made all the sense in the world. She called to him. “Hey, Nathaniel!” She sucked in her breath, swallowing blood and gritty bits of gauze in the process. “You know where I was all this time? You know where I was?”

  “The dentist?” answered Nathaniel hesitantly. He was still wondering about the Rocky Road.

  Her mouth had filled with spit, and she swallowed a second time. “I was on Planet Garlic.”

  It hurt Penelope’s mouth to smile, but Nathaniel’s grin was contagious. “Ow,” she moaned, though not unhappily. Maybe other people felt hazy after oral surgery, but Penelope felt more awake than she had for days. The bubble had popped.

  Penelope’s lips were still numb, which made it difficult to talk. “That doesn’t matter,” her mother snapped. “We’ll do all the talking. That is” — she interrupted herself to send a searing look at Herbert Schwartzbaum across the table — “if your jetlagged father agrees to put down his puzzle.”

  Having been away, Herbert Schwartzbaum had lots of puzzles to catch up on.

  “What were you thinking writing on a desk?” That was Mrs. Schwartzbaum, she’d had her face-to-face conference with Dr. Alvin while Penelope was at the dentist.

  “I wasn’t thinking,” slurred Penelope.

  “I should say not!”

  “I-I blanked out.”

  “What do you mean blanked out? What kind of excuse is that, blanked out?”

  Mr. Schwartzbaum’s agitated foot tapping on the floor sounded like a machine gun going off. “Stop that, Herbert!” hissed Mrs. Schwartzbaum.

  “Listen, Penelope, you’re not going to get anywhere in life if you don’t pay attention. You’ve got to be alert. From now on you’re going to bed earlier. And you’ve got to modify your behavior. Writing on desks! Like a vandal! What’s that about? Were you trying to be cool or something? You know, that’s going to go on your permanent record. On your college transcript! You do know seventh grade counts for college, right? You better believe Dr. Alvin didn’t hesitate to remind me of that.”

  Penelope touched a spoon of melted ice cream to her lips to see if she could feel the metal’s coldness.

  “Herbert, do you have anything to add?” demanded Mrs. Schwartzbaum.

  Penelope’s father tugged at his mustache. “Huh?”

  “Well, I guess that answers that,” huffed Mrs. Schwartzbaum. She told Pene
lope they’d be hiring her an Algebra tutor, and then she was off to attend a party with Fred Something and other luminaries from the worlds of art and finance, leaving Penelope and her father alone at the kitchen table with a puzzle of empty boxes and words that needed to go in them.

  “I’m gonna go lie down,” said Penelope unsteadily.

  “Hey, kiddo,” her father called to her, his eyes never straying from his puzzle. “Writing on furniture is a bad habit. Start doing that around here, and, well …” His mustache gave a mischievous twitch. “Well, we can only imagine how your mother would react then.”

  Penelope didn’t know what to say.

  “How about using something unorthodox? You know, like paper?” As if that reminded him of something, he reached inside his blazer pocket and pulled out a flat paper bag. He slid it along the table toward Penelope. “Sorry, I didn’t have a chance to buy gifts this time.”

  Inside the bag was a folder of stationery from a hotel her father had stayed at in Amsterdam, a spiral notebook that said WELCOME TO HOLLAND on the front, and a gold pen stamped with THE RITZ: PARIS logo.

  It was the first time he hadn’t brought her back a doll.

  When Penelope stepped off the school bus after her suspension, she knew exactly what she had to do, and it didn’t involve watching Vicki and Stacy sip coffee with half-and-half in the cafeteria.

  Instead, she walked across the field. Her stomach fell as her feet treaded the very place where Tillie had been attacked. She bit her lip, still tender from the dentist, and followed the crooked walkway she’d seen Cass take. Penelope had never been to this part of campus before. Behind her a voice screamed, “Hey, man, wait up!” Another yelled: “Kaufman, do we have glee club now or what?” She kept going.

  The crooked walkway became a set of steps. Penelope followed them down and found herself in front of The Elston Art Center. Inside, it wasn’t as clean as Gritzfield Hall or as newly renovated as the Solden Science Center. The paint on the walls was peeling, and the hallways were lined with canvases in all different sizes. At the end of the hallway, off to the left, was a room called The Annex.