Cardboard Ocean

by Mike McCardell

  There was no worry we might feel bad. Half the school stood against the wall. The other kids sat on the long wooden benches and opened their Pinocchio lunch boxes and started to eat their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

  The rest of us moved forward and the ladies with the white aprons handed us each a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper and a small container of milk. We sat and opened the milk. It was always room temperature and it always had pieces of wax floating around in it that was broken off from the containers.

  We drank the milk and spit the wax at each other. The sandwiches were always the same, peanut butter and jelly, except we knew they were made the day before because the bread was stale and the jelly had soaked almost through one side of it.

  In class we could not understand eating without chewing since most of us were still chewing on the sandwich which we had a hard time swallowing.

  “It doesn’t chew. It drinks,” said Miss Johnson.

  Impossible, we thought.

  We watched her pour a half bottle of ink into a jar and then put the celery into the jar.

  Ugh. Poor celery, we thought.

  “Now you will see how the ink rises up in the veins of the celery,” said Miss Johnson.

  “You can’t do that, Miss Johnson,” said about twenty kids, and a bunch more wanted to say it.

  Thirty-six kids all had the same thought of the horrible poison-ness of drinking ink. We knew you could get ink poison if you got stabbed by a pen, which was worse than lead poison if you got stabbed by a pencil, so we only used pens in fights when we really meant it.

  “It will only take a short time,” said Miss Johnson. “Celery is very thirsty.”

  Thirty-six kids curled up their tongues and pulled in their cheeks in sympathy and leaned over their desks. We were not allowed to leave our seats, except to go to the bathroom and then you had to raise your hand and tell everyone you had to go. Miss Johnson would stop her teaching and give you the bathroom pass out of the top drawer of her desk. It was a piece of old deep brown wood about the size of your hand with a chain through a hole in one end and a bell about the size of your fist attached to the chain.

  “Hurry back,” she would say.

  But this time we didn’t have to go. We were worried about the celery.

  One hand went up. Usually there were no questions about anything. Three hands went up. Then ten.

  Miss Johnson smiled. Her teaching was reaching us. She pointed at Richard French, who was sort of the teacher’s pet since he couldn’t walk because of polio. He had crutches.

  Our mothers warned us not to touch the water in the gutters because we too would get polio. That would mean we might end up in an iron lung. We had all been shown pictures of that. They were big metal tubes lying on their sides. The kids inside had their heads sticking out one end. They were always lying on their backs and there was a mirror a few inches above their faces. The mirrors were tilted so they could look at the people who were standing behind their heads.

  We were told the pressure was raised and lowered inside the metal tube which made them breathe. They could not move anything. They would spend their lives in there. What amazed me was the pictures always showed the kids smiling. I didn’t believe them.

  Some kids who got polio only got it a little, like Richard. So he could breathe but couldn’t walk.

  “Miss Johnson, that’s mean and cruel making that celery drink ink,” Richard said.

  We could see she did not like that. Richard French was always the one who knew what she was talking about because he had looked it up in the encyclopedia. Most of us did not know what an encyclopedia was, or what looking up meant. But now Richard French was disagreeing with Miss Johnson. This was as good as a street fight.

  “Don’t worry, Richard,” she said. “It’s only celery. It doesn’t know any difference.”

  Richard’s mouth dropped open. I had heard mouths dropped open when they could not believe something, but I had never seen it. But Richard’s mouth dropped open.

  “But it does,” he said. “You wouldn’t like to drink ink, would you?”

  Miss Johnson was losing. It was a fight without punches and she was losing and we could see it. First the open mouth of Richard French whose mouth never opened unless he was talking about things we knew nothing about. Then the disagreement. It was like he hit her.

  “We will go on with the lesson,” she said.

  She lost. We knew that. It was like a technical knockout. We learned about those on the radio when some giant sweaty loser who couldn’t hold his fists up anymore would be counted out by the ref even though he was still on his feet.

  We tried that on the street. We would punch and hit each other until someone put down his fists.

  “Technical knockout,” the other kid would shout. “Technical knockout.”

  “Is not,” said the guy with the dropped fists. “I was only resting.”

  Then he would hit the kid who was shouting “tko” extra hard and knock him back onto the fender of a car and he would shout, “Real knockout, real knockout.”

  The kid who got belted would push himself up off the ground and say, “You can’t have a real knockout after a technical knockout. I tko’ed you before you ko’ed me. So I won.”

  So when Richard French said “you wouldn’t like to drink ink, would you?” to Miss Johnson we knew he had a tko.

  Miss Johnson ignored him and tried to tell us something about plants and oxygen and carbon dioxide, but we all sat in our seats looking at the poor celery.

  Ten minutes later, Miss Johnson said we could come to the front of the classroom one row at a time and observe the wonders of science. The celery was in the jar sitting on her desk.

  There were ughs and yucks from the first kids who got up and looked. Then there were groans from the next row. The ink was rising in the body of the celery. By the time the fourth row was called, the class was in mourning for the green stalk that was turning black.

  Miss Johnson was nice, I thought, even pretty. She was just doing what teachers do and we were doing what we did. The problem was we did not fit in with what teachers do.

  Then while the fifth row was crowding around the celery, a kid raised his hand and said he had to go to the bathroom. Miss Johnson told him to get the pass and hurry back. He squeezed around the kids who were standing around her desk and got the pass and the kids kept saying, “Poor celery. We feel sorry for you.”

  “Celery doesn’t feel anything,” said Miss Johnson. “You don’t have to feel sorry for it.”

  “But we do,” said Richard French, who was back in his seat at the front of the classroom.

  “You children are being silly,” she said. “This is a lesson in biology and someday when you get to high school you will have to dissect a frog.”

  We said nothing.

  “Do you know what ‘dissect’ means?”

  Thirty-five kids had a blank stare. Richard French raised his hand. Miss Johnson nodded.

  “It means cut up,” he said.

  “Oh, yuck,” said thirty-five kids. “You mean we have to cut up a frog?”

  Feet scraped under the desk and the noise rose with no real words being said.

  “Ugh. Yuck. I don’t want to cut up a frog,” said Dorothy.

  “What’s a frog?” said Vinnie.

  “It’s an animal, you goof,” said another kid.

  Vinnie got out of his seat. “Don’t call me that,” he said.

  “Well, you are if you don’t know what a frog is. Everyone knows about frogs.”

  “I don’t want to hurt one,” said Dorothy.

  Miss Johnson was having trouble. “They will be dead when you get them.”

  “Oh, no,” said thirty-five kids including Vinnie. “We don’t want to hold a dead frog.”

  “Quiet down,” shouted Miss Johnson. “Quiet. That’s not until high school and some of you won’t get there. Right now we are just concerned with celery. So please, go back to your seats,” she said to the
kids standing around her desk.

  “We want to look a little more,” someone said.

  “No, go back to your seats.”

  “Just a little.”

  “Do as you’re told.”

  The kids started moving, but not to their seats. They shuffled around and changed places and said “poor celery.”

  Then the kid who went to the bathroom came back. He sort of slipped through the door and moved past the kids standing around the desk. He dropped the bathroom pass on Miss Johnson’s desk and went back to his seat. The rest of the kids followed and went back to their seats.

  “Very good,” said Miss Johnson. “A quiet class is a good class. And now do we understand how celery drinks water?”

  She walked back to her desk and looked down. If she was shocked or surprised she did not show it. She just looked and almost shook her head, then almost smiled. We were all good at seeing things that were almost. She said nothing about the water.

  She looked up at us and said, “Tomorrow we will plant some seeds in a pot and see what happens.”

  We all looked at the jar on her desk. You could see it even from the back row. It still had the celery in it but it was filled with clean water.

  I knew from that moment that Miss Johnson was a good teacher, even if she did not believe that we swam in the Mediterranean. I couldn’t tell her she was a good teacher. I couldn’t go up to her and say, “Miss Johnson, even though you kill celery and don’t believe me, I think you’re a good teacher,” because if I did that, the other kids would beat me up. Being a kid in school is like being in a union. You don’t say nice things to management, ever.

  But later that day we were having our own graduation into growing up, and we didn’t need school or teachers for it. We were going to shave.

  The First Shave

  At least Vinnie was going to shave. The rest of us said we would, but first Vinnie. If he lived, then we would too.

  This was about six years before Jimmy Lee got married and we went to Augie for a shave. This we were doing on our own. Sort of.

  Vinnie had watched his father for weeks, and now he was ready. He used his father’s brush and swirled it around and around inside his father’s shaving mug, then he rubbed the brush over his chin.

  Holy mackerel. He was covered with soap. I was in awe. I had never seen this because of the lack of a father, but the other guys just said they could do the same thing with soap, except they didn’t want to because they only put soap on their faces before bed.

  “Let’s see you shave,” Buster said. “That’s the hard part.”

  “I saved one of my father’s old blades,” Vinnie said. “Dull blades can’t hurt as much.”

  He took it out of the thin blue paper envelope with the words, Gillette Blue Blade. It was double edged and Vinnie ran his thumb across one edge to see how sharp it was.

  “Owww,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I cut myself. Can’t you see I cut myself?”

  He grabbed his wrist and held up his right thumb. Blood was oozing out of the open slit.

  “I cut my stupid thumb.”

  “How’d you do that?” asked Buster. “I thought it was dull.”

  Vinnie squeezed his wrist tighter and leaned against the sink.

  “It’s still sharp,” Vinnie yelled. “It’s still a razor blade, you dummy. They’re sharp even when they’re not.”

  He held his thumb under the faucet and it looked like he was losing even more blood.

  “I hope you don’t bleed to death before you shave,” I said.

  A couple of us found a styptic pencil in the medicine cabinet. They are supposed to stop the bleeding. Vinnie moved his thumb away from the water, dried it with a piece of toilet paper, then we rubbed the pencil on it.

  “Owww!” Vinnie shrieked and jumped and I wished that I wouldn’t grow up too soon.

  He stuck his hand back under the running water to wash away whatever was in the pencil then pulled it out and wrapped a giant wad of toilet paper around his finger.

  “That hurts like crazy,” said Vinnie. “It’s like I got stabbed and you know how much that hurts.”

  “Come on, are you going to shave, or are you chicken?” asked Joey.

  “No, I’m not chicken. I just have to stop bleeding in case I cut myself again because someone my fadder knows died when he lost too much blood.”

  “I think you’re a chicken. I think you’re using your finger as an excuse not to shave,” said Tommy.

  “Oh, yeah?” said Vinnie. “When my fadder was in the Army he got shot in the arm once but he still kept on fighting. I’m just like him. I can shave with a bleeding finger.”

  “I thought your father was in the Navy,” said Tommy. “You said he was on a battleship.”

  Vinnie looked in the mirror at Tommy’s face.

  “He was in the Army after he was in the Navy.”

  The truth is Vinnie’s father had been in the Army, the Navy and the Marines. He had fought at D-Day and in the South Pacific. He had taken a hundred German prisoners and was one of the guys who raised the flag over Iwo Jima.

  He was also in the merchant marine on a Liberty ship and his ship was blown up and he was one of only five guys who survived the sharks. That’s the truth because Vinnie told us, and when he told us he said it right into our faces with our noses almost touching.

  The fact that Vinnie’s father looked like an ordinary guy going off to work in the morning with his lunch in his brown paper bag meant nothing. He was hiding his past because he was still on a secret mission, Vinnie said.

  The fact that when he passed the bar some of the guys inside said, “Four-F” meant nothing. He did not go into the bar, which we knew meant he was better than the guys in the bar. And he wasn’t Four-F, because Vinnie said he wasn’t. He used that as part of his disguise.

  He wasn’t like the guy who lived below Johnny Martin. We knew he had been a frog man in the war because we had seen him once without his shirt on a summer day when he was cleaning the windows in his apartment. He had a row of holes across his back where machine gun bullets had got him.

  Vinnie said his father had more bullet holes. He just didn’t show them.

  “But are you going to shave?” Tommy asked.

  Vinnie put the razor to his face.

  “Ouch!”

  He cut himself on the first stroke. His shaving cream turned pink. He took more toilet paper off the roll and put it to his face, but the paper got soggy from the soap and messy and you can’t stop bleeding with soggy paper.

  He got more paper and held it against his cheek. When it stopped bleeding he picked up the razor again and took another stroke on his other cheek.

  “Darn!” he said.

  He cut himself again.

  “Owww!”

  This owww was louder than the first owww, and now his face looked like wet pink cotton candy.

  I think the only reason he didn’t stop was because we were there. He put more paper over the soap and blood and held it for a moment. Then with his left hand he held his outstretched index finger across his cheek and put the razor over his finger. Now when he pulled the razor down it didn’t actually touch his face.

  He rinsed off the soap and started to bleed again from all his cuts. He said it was stinging. He put more paper over his face and then put bandages on his face and thumb, and then he went outside.

  “What happened to you?” Vanessa asked.

  Vinnie tried to act surprised.

  “Oh, you mean this?” He pointed to his face. “It’s nothing.”

  “That must hurt,” she said.

  “Naah,” said Vinnie. “I didn’t even notice it. It’s just a flesh wound. It’s just like being in the Army.”

  Dying for a Smoke

  My mother was lying in bed reading. The smoke from her cigarette rose in a straight line, then about a foot up it broke into a twirl, then a circle, then it flattened out when it got to the ceiling.

>   She took another drag, held it in for a moment like she always did, then blew it out without taking her eyes off the page.

  I knew it was bad to smoke in bed because you might fall asleep and set the bed on fire and burn to death as well as burning down the entire building and killing others and putting people out on the street. But it had not happened yet. Sometimes she put her cigarette in the ashtray that was sitting on the electric blanket next to her. She was always cold, so she used an electric blanket even though I thought it was weird to plug in a blanket.

  But mostly I watched the smoke and thought when I started smoking I would pretend that my cigarette was a train with smoke pouring out.

  It was better than the straw. We had been pretending to smoke since Miss Johnson read something called Dick and Jane to us. I had no idea of what the story was about, but we saw a drawing on the cover of Dick with a piece of straw in his mouth.

  “What’s that, Miss Johnson?”

  “What’s what?”

  “That thing sticking out of Dick’s mouth?”

  Miss Johnson looked at the picture. “Is that the only thing you got out of this book?”

  We nodded.

  “Why do I bother?” she said.

  “Well, what is that thing?”

  “Straw,” she said. “Just a piece of straw.”

  We screwed up our faces. “Where do you get straw from?”

  She stood in front of the class and shook her head. “It’s just straw. You are supposed to be learning about the relationship between friends and you care only about straw? Where did I go wrong?”

  We stared back blankly. “You didn’t go wrong, Miss Johnson,” said Vinnie. “We were just wondering where you get straw, so we can be like him.”

  “But that’s not the important thing,” she said.

  She put down the book and told us to take out our spelling books and learn the first column of words. Then she sat down behind her desk.

  After school we gathered on the corner.

  “Straw would be so neat,” said Joey. “We could pretend we were smoking.”

  But we had no idea of how to get straw. We went to the variety store and asked the old man with the few strands of white hair hanging over his head if he had straw for sale.