Penpal

by Dathan Auerbach

  His cries were coming from my walkie-talkie.

  Boxes never came home.

  Maps

  Most old cities and the neighborhoods in them weren’t planned in anticipation of a tremendous population growth. Generally speaking, the layout of the roads is originally in response to geographical restrictions and the necessity of connecting points of economic importance. Once the connecting roads are established, new businesses and roads are positioned strategically along the existing skeleton, and eventually the paths carved into the earth are immortalized in asphalt, leaving room only for minor modifications, additions, and alterations, but rarely a dramatic change.

  If that is true, then my childhood neighborhood must have been old. If straight lines move “as the crow flies,” then my neighborhood must have been built based on the travels of a snake. The first houses would have been placed around the lake, I’m sure, and while older, these houses were the nicest in the neighborhood. Gradually, the inhabitable area increased as new extensions were built off the original path, but these new extensions all ended abruptly at one point or another. All the neighborhood streets converged into a single strip of pavement that connected with the road into town; this was the only legitimate way either in or out of the neighborhood. A tributary, which both fed and drank from the lake, limited many of these extensions as it bifurcated the woods before passing right by The Ditch.

  Many of the original homes had enormous yards, but some of those original plots, and all of the later lots, had been divided, leaving properties with smaller and smaller boundaries. An aerial view of my neighborhood would give one the impression that an enormous squid had once died in the woods, only to be found by some adventuring entrepreneur who paved roads over its tentacles, withdrawing his involvement to leave time, greed, and desperation to divide up the land between the roads among prospective home-owners like an embarrassing attempt at the Golden Ratio.

  Our house was on a small rectangle of land, but we had a front and back yard. This was a luxury that would be eliminated over time as there were some residents who shared patches of land that were as big as the one upon which my house was placed. Even still, developers were carting in and assembling new modular homes, and families were continuing to park their trailer-homes on smaller and smaller lots; the neighborhood had been undergoing this expansion for a long time.

  From my porch, you could see the old houses that surrounded the lake, and while these were all beautiful, the house of Mrs. Maggie was my favorite. It was an off-white, colonial-style house, though it was more modest than what that style typically offers. There was only one story, though a trinity of false windows extending off the lowest part of the roof convinced me that there were at least two. Her porch wrapped around her house all the way to the back where it grew an appendage that moved down a slightly sloping hill and became a dock once it settled on the water.

  Like many of the yards with nicer homes on them, Mrs. Maggie’s had a sprinkler system that was on a timer; though at some point over the years, her timer must have broken because the sprinklers would come on at various points during the day, and often even at night, all year. While it never got cold enough to snow where I lived, several times each winter I would go outside in the morning to see Mrs. Maggie’s yard transformed into a surreal arctic paradise by the frozen water from her sprinklers.

  Every other yard stood sterilized and arid by the biting frost of the winter’s cold, but right there in the middle of the bleak reminder of the savagery of the season was an oasis of beautiful ice, hanging like stalactites from every branch of every tree and every leaf of every bush. As the sun rose, its light spread through her trees, and each piece of ice splintered the rays into a rainbow that could only be viewed briefly before it blinded you. Even as a child, I was struck by how beautiful it was, and often Josh and I would go over there to walk on the iced grass and have sword fights with the icicles.

  Mrs. Maggie was, as best as I can remember, around eighty years old, and was one of the friendliest and sweetest people I had ever met, despite her quirks. She had a head of loose-set white curls and always wore light dresses with floral patterns over her frail, but not sickly, body. When it was warm and Josh and I would go swimming in the lake, she would sit out on her back porch and just talk with us. She never brought a book or a magazine, never had a crossword puzzle or a word-search; I think she came out on those days just to visit.

  Sometimes we would swim out nearly to the center of the oval lake, and she would call us back, yelling not to swim too far, but we never listened. When we played close to the shore, she would ask us about school, and any time we told her what we were learning or what assignments we had, she would say that we should be thankful because she always had to work harder when she was our age. I once told her that we were building a spaceship; Mrs. Maggie said that we were getting off easy.

  While the last weeks of kindergarten played out, Josh and I found ourselves in the lake nearly every weekend, and so nearly every weekend Mrs. Maggie found herself out on her porch. The Community group was wrapping up the Balloon Project, and on the day that we took our last pictures home, Josh had come to play at my house after school. Though the initial enthusiasm for the project had long since abated, taking all the Polaroids off the map and bringing them home had stirred the embers of our dwindling excitement.

  When we were swimming in the lake that day, Josh asked how far I thought a letter might go if we put it in a bottle and threw it into the ocean. We guessed at this until Mrs. Maggie, who was eavesdropping, interjected and said that it would depend on which ocean it was and what the currents were like. She said, as she gestured toward the tributary, that we could even throw it into the lake and it might travel hundreds of miles.

  I asked her if she thought the bottle would go farther than a balloon, and she looked at me quizzically as if she expected me to elaborate. I thought she already knew about the Balloon Project; I thought I had explained it to her before, but I told her about it anyway. She said that she had never heard of an experiment exactly like that, and that it sounded wonderful. Her husband, Tom, was a pilot, and she joked that if one of our balloons had been caught on the wing of his plane, it could have ended up on the other side of the world.

  Mrs. Maggie said that Tom should be home any day and that she would ask him if he saw any balloons in the sky while he was flying. She was smiling so cheerfully that I didn’t want to upset her by pointing out that she had already told us that joke months ago.

  When Josh and I started paddling toward the shore, Mrs. Maggie invited us in for snacks. This was fairly routine; she would laugh and say that she had made too much food or lemonade and would gesture enthusiastically for us to walk up the dock and onto her porch. It was a tempting offer, especially when it was hot outside or we had tread water for too long, but we would always decline as politely as young boys knew how; Mrs. Maggie wasn’t a stranger, but despite how kind she was, we were never comfortable enough with her to accept her invitation. I don’t know what Josh’s reservations were, exactly, but mine began the day I met Mrs. Maggie.

  The first time I met her was the first time my mother let me walk home from the bus stop by myself. For the first few weeks of kindergarten, my mom had made arrangements with her employer to pick me up from school, but this meant that to make up for the lost time, she would have to leave me at our house alone for about an hour each day. We didn’t live very far from my elementary school, but the lines to pick up the students were always long; so long, in fact, that the students who rode the bus would often make it back to their houses before we made it back to ours.

  Eventually my mom relaxed enough to let me ride the bus, and she would meet me with her car where the bus dropped me off. Many of the other kids that shared my bus stop, however, had their own keys to their houses, and I would get into my mom’s car and watch them run and skip home with their keys dangling around their necks or swinging from their hands. This made me jealous.

  I pleaded w
ith my mom to let me travel as freely as the other kids did, and gradually her reflexive dismissal wavered, and we reached a compromise. She gave me a key to the front door and attached it to a black rope lanyard; I wore it around my neck and felt that there was barely anything left to distinguish me from adults at that point.

  About a month or so into kindergarten, I rode the bus home as usual, but kept one foot in the aisle this time. I was going to use my key for the first time, and we were nearing my stop. The bus braked, and I was first to stand as I waited for the driver to let us out. I poured out of the bus with the other kids that shared my stop and could see my mom waiting for me on the porch in the distance. As I closed the gap and passed the house that sometimes transformed into an ice palace, I met Mrs. Maggie.

  “Chris?”

  I didn’t turn and barely even noticed the voice.

  “Chris! It is you!”

  Turning to my left, I saw a thin old woman hustling across her lawn, her floral-patterned dress billowing in the warm summer air. I looked to my right and then behind me, but I was the only person in the street. She was calling to me. I started walking faster, but my confusion had slowed my pace, and she caught up with me with her careful but quick steps.

  The woman stopped in front of me, put her hands on my shoulders, and looked steadily into my eyes. As she closed her eyes tightly and furrowed her brow, I saw beads of tears streak down her cheeks. I tried to move away, but she pulled me into her and wrapped her arms around me as tightly as she could probably manage.

  “Oh, Chris. I’ve missed you so …”

  I suppose I was scared by what she was doing, but I wasn’t scared of her. She seemed nice, and not knowing what else to do, I dropped my lunchbox, put my right arm around her, and awkwardly rested my still mending and plaster-encased left arm on her side.

  “Hey!” My mom’s voice struggled against the wind as she jogged from our porch to where the woman and I stood.

  My mother gently, but somewhat forcefully, wrestled me from the embrace and told me to go home. As I ran home, I could hear the woman yelling “Chris!” until I vanished into the house. Once inside, I put my backpack on the dining room table and sat down on one of its chairs.

  I didn’t know what had just happened or what was happening right at that moment, but my concern laid mostly on what might happen when my mom came back in. I rested my head against my hand and saw a piece of white paint that had cracked and risen just above the surface of the table. I pinched it between my fingers and peeled it away; it was the first time I vandalized that table.

  When my mother came back inside the house, I couldn’t quite understand what her expression signified, but she didn’t seem angry, so I felt relieved. I turned in the chair and faced her.

  “Who was that lady, mom?”

  She smiled at me as she drew closer. “Her name is Mrs. Maggie. She lives in that house you were in front of – the white one.”

  “The one with all the ice?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Is she weird?” I asked hesitantly.

  “No. She’s … she’s just a little sick, baby.”

  “She thought my name was Chris. She kept calling me that over and over again.”

  “It’s okay, sweetheart. She’s a nice lady, so be nice back. But when you get off the bus, you just come straight home, okay?”

  And that’s exactly what I would do. The strange events of the day I met Mrs. Maggie didn’t trouble me for long, and if I heard her calling for me by that same wrong name, I would just walk a little faster to my house.

  About a month later, my cast was removed. Josh and I had talked about swimming in the lake since before the first time he came to my house, but my cast forbid it. I could have tried to protect my arm from the lake water by wearing the latex bag that I used for showers. I considered this; only briefly, though – that bag had failed me before. Once the cast was removed, we took to swimming in the lake immediately, taking advantage of what warm weather remained. I remember how strange and weak my atrophied arm felt as it pushed through the water that first time, and I remember thinking that I’d better not push too hard or it might just snap again.

  Josh and I got to know Mrs. Maggie fairly well by swimming in the lake almost every weekend, taking a hiatus only when it became time for Mrs. Maggie’s yard to freeze again. When winter had passed, and Josh and I returned to the lake in the second half of kindergarten, we still wouldn’t accept Mrs. Maggie’s invitations or snacks, but one afternoon she surprised us with a different kind of offer.

  We had expected her to invite us inside again, but this time when we looked toward her as she called to us, we saw her throw a small package into the water like one might throw a Frisbee. Hesitantly, but mostly curiously, we swam to it. Josh and I grabbed for it at the same time and wrestled it back and forth, ripping the plastic wrapping as we struggled, and throwing the object into the water.

  “What is it?” Josh asked.

  “I dunno. I think we have to unfold it …”

  And so we did, but even after it was fully expanded, it was still hard to identify. We moved it around in the water – turning it in different ways – when finally Josh found an inflation tube jutting out of the grey and black mass. I heard him breathe deep and watched him pour his lungs into it. When he tired, I took over, and as we tread the water, we passed the gift back and forth until it was completely filled. I folded the stopper into the tube, and we flipped our inflated present over.

  It was a float – one shaped and painted like a shark.

  We splashed frantically to climb onto it, but each time one of us would make progress, the other would roll the float in an attempt to mount it. As we competed, I glanced at Mrs. Maggie and saw her laughing and clapping her hands. Eventually, we decided to take turns riding it, but the float soon doubled as a mechanical bull as the swimmer would invariably move underneath the shark and push up forcefully in an effort to unbalance the rider. Through all of this, Mrs. Maggie looked on us with a smile shining on her face.

  As we paddled toward where we exited the lake, we yelled a “thank you” to Mrs. Maggie, and she said that seeing how much we liked it was thanks enough. She always treated us warmly, but there was a variance in her enthusiasm that we could never anticipate or make sense of. Mrs. Maggie was always at least pleased to see us, but there were times where she was simply overjoyed that we were there, swimming just behind her house. That day was one of those days, and as we pulled ourselves out of the water, carrying the float over our heads, she called to us as she sometimes would when she was excited to see us.

  “Chris! John! You’re always welcome here!” There were times when we could still hear her yelling those same words as we walked back into my house; we heard her that day. But we were kids, and despite how truly nice Mrs. Maggie was, her quirks sometimes got the best of us.

  As we carried our new gift up the steps to my house, I opened my front door for Josh.

  “After you, John.”

  “Oh no. Please. After you, Chris,” Josh snickered.

  “Oh no. I insist. After you, John,” I rebutted.

  “Be my guest, Chris. After you,” he returned with the cadence of some crude mixture of English royalty and American upper-class snobbery.

  “Would you like to come in for some snacks, John?”

  “Yes I would, Chris!”

  We laughed as we walked through the doorway at the same time, leaving the float on the steps behind us. I saw my mother standing in the kitchen staring at us. She moved toward us and stopped in front of us. She spoke sharply and firmly.

  “Don’t you ever make fun of her like that again. It’s not funny. Do you understand me?”

  Josh and I looked at one another and then back at her and nodded. My mother smiled and went back to what she was doing, and Josh and I put it out of our minds for the remainder of the day. After Josh left with his dad, I told my mom that we weren’t trying to be mean, and we never talked like that in front of Mr
s. Maggie. My mom said that didn’t matter; she said that it was rude to make fun of anyone whether they were around or not. When I told her that she was constantly calling us by the wrong names, and we just thought it was funny, my mom seemed to search for what she wanted to say.

  “Well, sweetie, you remember how I told you Mrs. Maggie was sick?”

  I nodded.

  “She … Mrs. Maggie is sick … up here.” She gestured to her own head with her fingers.

  “But you remember how, when you had that sore throat earlier this year, sometimes you’d feel okay, but then other times you’d feel really bad? That’s how it is for her too. But when Mrs. Maggie gets really sick, she gets confused. That’s why she messes up you boys’ names sometimes. She doesn’t mean to, but sometimes she just can’t remember. Do you understand?”

  I nodded again. “She wants us to come in for snacks sometimes.”

  “I know she does, sweetie. She lives in that big house all by herself so it’s okay if you talk to her when you swim in the lake. But when she invites you in, you should keep saying ‘no.’ Be polite, and her feelings won’t get hurt. Okay?”

  “But she’ll be less lonely when Tom comes home though? How long until he comes back? It seems like he’s always gone.”

  My mom seemed to struggle, and I could see that she had become very upset. Finally, she answered me.

  “Honey … Tom’s not going to come home. Tom’s … he’s in heaven. He died years and years ago, but Mrs. Maggie doesn’t remember. She gets confused and forgets, but Tom’s not ever coming home; he’s gone, sweetie.”

  I was only six years old when she told me that, and while I didn’t understand it completely, I was still profoundly sad for Mrs. Maggie. I knew what it was like to miss someone – how much it hurt and tore at you. But to miss someone so much while being so sure that he’d return, never knowing or remembering just how impossible that reunion truly was – I struggled to imagine what that must be like. I wouldn’t learn until very recently, however, what Mrs. Maggie’s life had really been like.