Clementine and the Spring Trip

by Sara Pennypacker

  “Wow,” Lilly sighed. “Talking Olive makes you sound like you come from another country!”

  “Well, so what,” I said. “My language makes you sound like you come from another planet.”

  Olive spun around. “What planet?”

  “Zephon,” I made up right away. This is a lucky thing about me: stuff comes out of my mouth without me even having to think about it! “Planet Zephon. You wouldn’t like it there, Olive. It’s a place where they don’t have olives.”

  When I got home from school, I went right into the kitchen for a snack. Margaret had spent the whole bus ride home re-reminding me about the eating-sounds rule, and it had made me hungry for really loud food. I grabbed a granola bar from the cupboard and took a big, crunching bite.

  Immediately my cat, Moisturizer, came skittering into the kitchen to see if what I was eating was Kat Krunchies. When he saw it was just human food, he turned his nose up and began playing the new game he invented: I Am NOT Interested in You!

  I walked over to the window above the sink and pretended to be fascinated by the feet walking by on the sidewalk. In a second, I heard his soft paws coming over to stop beside me. But when I looked down, he yawned to show me how not-interested in me he was. I sat down at the table, and then he sauntered over to the table too, as if it was just a big coincidence that we both needed to be there. When I looked over to say hi to him, he flopped down and stared at his tail, as if he had no idea how this miraculous toy had become attached to his back.

  Just then, my mother came into the kitchen. She didn’t say “Hi, honey, how was your day?” the way she usually does. Instead, she yanked open the refrigerator and stared into it exactly the way a starving wolf stares into an empty rabbit hole, which I saw on the Nature Channel once, except Mom was not actually drooling. I knew what this meant: my mother was having a craving.

  When you are pregnant you get to eat whatever you want, together with whatever else you want, whenever you want it, just by saying the magic words “I’m having a craving.” What you always hear about is pickles and ice cream, but my mother has not craved either of those things, not even separately. My father buys them every week just in case, though. At the end of the week, he sits down with a gigantic bowl of ice cream and a side dish of pickles, so he can use them up. “The things I do for your mother,” he says. Then he goes to get a fresh supply of pickles and ice cream, and also raw clams, which is what my mother is actually craving.

  “There are no clams in here,” my mother wailed now, so loudly that Mrs. Jacoby on the top floor probably heard her. “I will go out of my mind if I can’t have some clams right now!”

  My dad came skidding into the kitchen and patted my mom’s shoulder. “You ate a whole platter of them yesterday,” he reminded her gently. “Dear.”

  My mom spun around to give him a look that said she was N-O-T, not kidding about needing raw clams right now. My dad threw his palms up and backed away. Then he gestured for me to meet him at the front door. We put on our Red Sox caps, which Mitchell insists we wear once baseball season opens, and headed out to the fish market.

  “Now…clams,” he said, when we were outside. “This is a really good sign, let me tell you. This means your little brother or sister is going to have a rock-hard head, like a clamshell. Our little guy’s going to be able to split firewood with a head like that. He or she will be able to butt right through a cement wall. A torpedo-head like that’s going to come in awfully handy for our family.”

  “What did Mom crave when she was pregnant with me?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

  “Pineapple,” my dad said. “She’d eat it with anything. Pineapple with peanut butter, pineapple with mustard, pineapple with chili. She couldn’t get enough of it.”

  “And that’s how you knew I’d be sweet,” I said, the way I always do.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Clementine!” my father said, the way he always does. He rapped the top of my head with his knuckles. “That’s how we knew you’d have spiky green skin!”

  Wednesday morning, we had oatmeal for breakfast. “Tell me if you can hear me eating this,” I said to my brother. I took a tiny mouse-nibble, sealed my lips tight around it, and swallowed as quietly as I could.

  My brother bugged his eyes and clapped his hands over his ears as though the jackhammers from Boston Common had started up again, extra volume. I glared at him, which made him laugh so hard he tipped out of his chair.

  One way my brother is like my father is that he thinks he is a comedian. One way he is N-O-T, not like my father is that he is never funny.

  “Never mind,” I told him. “You’ll have to eat with the fourth graders one day, and you won’t be laughing then.”

  The whole bus ride to school, Margaret re-warned me about the rule. Just hearing about all the food sounds that could get me in trouble practically gave me a nervous breakdown. Things got worse when I went into my classroom.

  After my teacher and I said “Yet?” and “Not yet,” he called me up to his desk. “Clementine, I’ve arranged for you to partner with Olive for the field trip tomorrow,” he said.

  “I can’t. I’m already being partners with Margaret. I promised her,” I said. “So…sorry.”

  “Margaret’s teacher will see to getting her another partner,” Mr. D’Matz said. “I need someone reliable to partner with our new student.”

  “Why me?” I asked. “Why not Willy, or Lilly? Why not Willy and Lilly together?” Although actually, I knew why not Willy and Lilly together —Lilly is too busy bossing Willy to boss a new person.

  “It’s a compliment, Clementine,” my teacher said. “I know you’ll do a good job of making Olive feel comfortable on the field trip.”

  I wanted to ask, What about Margaret? What about me? Now who’s going to make us feel comfortable on the field trip? But Mr. D’Matz was already standing up and collecting permission slips. Instead, when he asked for someone to deliver them to the office, I launched my hand like a rocket.

  After I dropped the permission slips off, I knocked on the principal’s door. Mrs. Rice stuck out her hand for the note from my teacher I usually have when I visit her, but I shook my head. “I’m here to volunteer to stay at school tomorrow and spy on the party for you.”

  “The party?” Mrs. Rice asked. “What party is that?”

  “The one the lunchroom ladies and the custodians are going to have. You know. With all the great food the lunchroom ladies hide from us.”

  “No, I don’t know about any party tomorrow,” Principal Rice said. “But what I do know about tomorrow is that it’s your field trip.”

  I heaved a tragedy sigh. “It’s too bad I’ll miss it. But the lunchroom ladies and the custodians are probably going to play poker and dance around,” I said, making my voice extra tragic. “Maybe the librarian, too. And the nurse. Maybe there will even be kissing at the party. You know what spring does to people. I’d better stay and watch for you. My friend Margaret can stay too.”

  “Clementine, the cafeteria is closed tomorrow, and all the staff have the day off. Now, I understand you’re going to buddy-up with our newest student on the field trip. Your teacher is counting on you. I think he’s made a wise choice.”

  Suddenly my head was too tired to pretend anymore. It dropped down to Mrs. Rice’s desk, which I think should have a pillow on it, because talking to her makes my head tired a lot.

  “Is something wrong, Clementine?” Mrs. Rice asked.

  I rolled my head over so my mouth could move. “Margaret can’t touch anything that might make her dirty,” I said. “She needs me to be with her so I can do all the doing things for her. Also, I need Margaret with me because I can’t do silent eating. I’ve been practicing at home, and I just can’t do it.” I lifted my still-tired head to look at her. “And anyway, I don’t even want to do silent eating. Why do I have to care about something stupid like that? I want to stay in third grade forever.”

  Principal Rice rested her cheek on her
hand. “You’re not excited to be a fourth grader next fall?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

  I explained everything that Margaret had explained to me about the fourth grade rule. I even added the horror-faces Margaret had made that had scared me so much, so she would understand.

  But when I was finished, Mrs. Rice only shrugged. “I agree with you about that rule. What do you think you should do?”

  Which meant that even though she was the boss of everybody in the school, she didn’t have any good ideas about not getting bossed by other people. So I pushed in the chair and told her I was all done being there.

  “See you tomorrow,” Principal Rice said.

  “Okay, fine,” I said. But it wasn’t.

  When I got home from school, I plunked myself next to the window to look for birds to draw for National Draw-A-Bird Day. No matter what’s wrong, making art always makes me feel better. Right away I saw something that would make a great picture: a pigeon struggling to peck apart a bagel out on the sidewalk. Mrs. Jacoby on the seventh floor dumped Cheerios out for the pigeons every day, and this pigeon looked like he was thinking, Wow, this one is gigantic!

  I borrowed a big piece of paper from my mom, who was working on her own drawing, and lay down on the floor to work. Let me tell you, it is not easy drawing the “I must be dreaming!” face on a pigeon, even for someone like me, who is practically a famous artist. The beak kept looking all cribbled up. As I was erasing it for the third time, my father stuck his head into the living room.

  “Clementine,” he said, “we’ve had a call from the Pentagon.”

  I jumped up and saluted. “We’d better go,” I answered.

  My mother threw her hands up in the air. “What is it with you two and this Pentagon joke, lately?” she cried. “I don’t get it.”

  “Sorry, top secret mission,” I told her. “National security.”

  My mom shook her head, and I followed my dad out to the basement. We went into the workshop, and I closed the door behind us. “You can’t be too careful when you’re working on the Pentagon,” I reminded him.

  My mom thinks we are kidding when we talk about the Pentagon, but the real joke is that we’re not. The Pentagon is an actual thing—just not the one near Washington that’s filled with army people. Our Pentagon is a secret present my dad and I are building to celebrate the new baby coming. Our Pentagon is a table, one that will be just right for our new family because it has five sides, one for everybody.

  It is not that easy building a five-sided table, let me tell you. The big problem is the corner angles—they aren’t square, the way they are on regular tables. I was the one who finally figured it out. “Look, Dad,” I said after we’d stared at the picture in my math book for a while. “A pentagon is really just three triangles, put together.”

  My dad turned the book around and around, but he still didn’t see it. So I drew it out on a piece of paper.

  My dad ruffled up my hair and grinned when he understood. “Genius kid,” he laughed. “So a triangle has a hundred and eighty degrees, and there are three, which means…”

  “Five hundred and forty,” I prompted. “A pentagon’s corners add up to five hundred and forty degrees.”

  “I think you’re right! And five hundred and forty degrees, divided by five is…”

  “A hundred and eight degrees,” I figured out.

  “Genius kid,” he said again, nodding. “I got me a genius kid.”

  My dad pulled the blanket off the Pentagon. It wasn’t a table yet, but you could tell that’s what it was going to be soon. The five legs were ready, cut the same length, and sanded until they were smooth. The top was a beautiful piece of wood we had rubbed with oil.

  “What are we doing today?” I asked.

  “Assembling the skirt,” my dad said. “The table skirt is made of the boards that run perpendicular to the tabletop, parallel to the perimeter, just beneath it…”

  He kept going with his la-de-blah-blah carpentry words, but I studied the plans instead.

  “I get it,” I interrupted him. “The skirt is the part that hangs down under the top like a skirt. That the legs stick out from, like a skirt.”

  “Well,” my dad said—“well, yes! That’s a better way to say it, I guess. Now, what we’re going to need are a saw and a drill and a pencil and some clamps.”

  We buckled on our tool belts and got to work. Let me tell you, it is very hard to hold boards together to clamp them and then mark them and drill the holes. Finally I dropped the drill. “I can’t do it!” I cried. “My hands are too confused!”

  “One at a time,” my dad said. “One tool. One hand. One piece of wood. One step. One at a time.”

  I held the board with one hand. My dad placed the ruler over it. With my other hand I marked the spot to drill. And my dad was right. One tool, one piece of wood, one step at a time, we built the Pentagon’s skirt.

  Just as I was hanging up my tool belt beside my dad’s, I heard the elevator clunk to a stop. My dad and I threw the cover over the Pentagon and closed the workshop door behind us.

  It was Margaret. She had a pinched-down, don’t-cry mouth, and she nodded at my apartment door without saying anything. I let her in, and then followed her to my bedroom.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  Margaret sank down onto my bed without even placing a germ-protective towel on the bedspread, something I had never seen before. “My mother and Alan aren’t just twitterpated,” she said. “They’re getting married! And Alan’s moving in! Mitchell only said, ‘Oh, cool,’ and then went off to baseball practice, as if it was no big deal. But it is a big deal. It’s terrible!”

  “But I thought you didn’t mind Alan anymore,” I said.

  “I’m used to him now,” Margaret said. “It’s not him I mind moving in with us. It’s his pipe. Alan’s pipe will be living at my house, Clementine! Every time I touch something, I’m going to have to worry about pipe germs crawling around on me. Things were fine the way they were. Why does my mother have to go and change everything?”

  This winter, when I’d found out about our new baby coming, I’d felt the same way: NO THANKS TO CHANGE!

  “Yep, change is part bad,” my dad had admitted. “But it’s part good, too,” he’d said. “It’s up to us to figure out which part to concentrate on.”

  “Well,” I said now to Margaret, “are there any good parts to Alan’s moving in?”

  Margaret scrunched her eyes closed and thought hard. “Alan hates baseball,” she said finally. “My mother and Mitchell are obsessed with it. Now at least we’ll be on even teams for television watching. Hey! Maybe we’ll get to watch The Neat Squad some nights instead of the Red Sox.”

  Margaret’s favorite television show is about a team of professional organizers who go into people’s messy houses and straighten them up while they are away, as if that would be a wonderful surprise to anybody. Once, my father had joked that he was going to call up that show and tell them about my bedroom, and I stopped speaking to him for a day and a half.

  Anyway, I didn’t think someone who left his pipe around everywhere was going to vote to watch a show called The Neat Squad.

  “Can you think of any other good things about them getting married?” I asked.

  Margaret said, “Hmm, hmmmm,” so long that I started to give up hope. But then she came up with something. “When my parents were married, they never kissed. Maybe my mother and Alan will stop kissing once they get married.” Margaret looked like she was trying hard to cheer herself up with this idea, so I didn’t tell her the bad news: my parents were married, and they kissed all the time.

  Margaret got up and walked over to my bureau. She stood there looking over my stuff, her hands twitching.

  I have a lot of different sections, like the fruit that’s my name. Watching Margaret at my bureau, half of my Clementine sections wanted to say, Don’t touch anything! But the other half of them were thinking, Oh, let her play Neat Squad on your bureau if it
will make her happy. Luckily, there was a knock at my door before I had to decide which half should win.

  It was my dad. He handed Margaret the photo he’d taken of her in the Common on Sunday. “Thought you might like a copy of this,” he said.

  Margaret’s whole body seemed to smile, looking at that picture. Which gave me a great idea.

  After she left, I got out my drawing of the pigeon with the bagel. I flipped it over and started on a new drawing. It took a long time, because I gave each of the brass ducklings their own sparkle rays, and then put a bunch on Margaret, too, so she looked like the sun. But when it was finished, it was beautiful. And although it was still a few days until National Draw-A-Bird Day, my dad and I went up to the lobby and taped it next to the display case.

  Thursday morning, my eyelids snapped open like cartoon window shades. If I could stay safe from the fourth graders, this was going to be a great day! I jumped out of bed and raced into the kitchen to pack my lunch. But my mother was already up, and she was doing it. “Mom, no!” I cried. “No crackers! No carrots! And no apple!”

  “Why not?” she asked, zipping the carrots into a bag. “You like them.”

  “I like them, but I can’t eat them! Those things make eating sounds you could hear on Mars.”

  “Clementine, what are you talking about?” She took out some almond butter.

  “And no almond butter! Almond butter makes snicking! This trip is with the fourth graders, Mom. They have a rule about eating sounds. No crunching, no chewing, no slurping, no glugging, and definitely no snicking.”

  My dad came in then, with my brother in his arms. “There is a rule about eating sounds?” he asked.

  “Of course,” I said. And then I explained to my parents everything Margaret had warned me about.