Clementine's Letter

by Sara Pennypacker

  But he only answers the phone this way when his mother isn’t home. Margaret and Mitchell’s mother doesn’t have a sense of humor. My dad says living with Margaret and her rules every day would strain anyone’s sense of humor.

  “Hi, Mitchell,” I said. “My mom wants to know if you can not-babysit us this afternoon and we could go to a grocery store.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Meet us in the lobby.”

  My mom and I strapped Cabbage into his stroller and waited by the elevator. When Margaret and Mitchell came down, my mom gave Mitchell two dollars to not-babysit us. Then she handed me some money to buy her a tube of oil paint at the art supply store.

  “Permanent rose,” she said.

  Sometimes I get confused in the art store. All those beautiful colors and all those beautiful names of beautiful colors make me a little dizzy. Alizarin crimson, cerulean blue, cadmium lemon. I started to feel faint just thinking about them. I stuck my arm out to my mom. “Maybe you should write it down.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll remember. Just think about your Great-Aunt Rose’s hair. She has a permanent. Permanent rose.”

  “Permanent rose,” I said. “I’ll remember.”

  “Okay, good-bye, see you in an hour, remember about the peanuts,” she said.

  My brother is allergic to peanuts. This means if he eats even one, his whole head will explode right off his neck.

  Then we got going. We went to the drugstore, the dry cleaner’s, and video drop-off. The last stop was the art store.

  In the paint section, hundreds of little paint tubes, all neat and new, sat on the shelf. Margaret threw her hands up and backed away, as if the tubes of paint were just waiting to burst all over her clean clothes. Margaret doesn’t even like to look at things that might get her dirty.

  “Quick, run over to the paper aisle!” I told her. “Just keep staring at all those nice clean stacks of paper.”

  Mitchell took my brother off for a stroll around the store, and I went back to staring at the beautiful colors. Burnt sienna, manganese violet, viridian green—I started to feel a little woozy.

  A clerk came over and asked if he could help me find something.

  “I’d like a tube of mustache rose oil paint,” I told him.

  “Mustache rose?” he asked. “Are you sure you’ve got the right name?”

  “I’m positive,” I told him. “I know because my Great-Aunt Rose has a mustache. Just a little bit. You have to look at her from the side to see it best. That’s how I remembered—the paint color is about my great-aunt’s hair.”

  Mitchell came up behind me and whispered into my ear.

  “Oh,” I said. “Make that a tube of permanent rose.”

  The clerk found the paint and we went up to the register to buy it. And there, sitting on the counter, was a big, beautiful wooden box with lots of little compartments inside. DELUXE ART SUPPLIES ORGANIZER, the sign said.

  “Look, Mitchell!” I said. “This is like a little apartment building for paints and brushes and things to live in. My mom keeps her stuff in old cookie tins. My brother’s always getting into them.… This has a lock! She would really like this. She’d like it so much she wouldn’t feel jealous about me helping my dad write a book!”

  The price tag said twenty dollars. I dug in my pockets. Two quarters and a nickel. The clerk handed me my mother’s change. Three dollars and eleven cents. Probably she wouldn’t mind loaning it to me for such a good present.

  “Can I borrow some money?” I asked Mitchell.

  “Nope,” he said. “I’m saving up for a new bat, remember?”

  I stared at him.

  Mitchell threw his arms across his face and staggered backward. “No!” he moaned. “Not stingray eyes! Anything but that!”

  My stingray eyes are extremely powerful. I use them only in emergencies. I turned them up to high power.

  “Aaaauuurrrggghhhh! I give up!” Mitchell cried. He took out his money: my mom’s two regular dollar bills and two brand-new ones. Margaret and Mitchell’s mother works in a bank. She exchanges all her dollar bills for clean, never-been-spent money so Margaret doesn’t have to worry about germs.

  Now I had seven dollars and sixty-six cents. “Margaret,” I yelled. “Come over here, please.”

  Margaret came over, squint-eyeing me.

  “How much money do you have?” I asked.

  “A dollar,” she answered. “I’m going to buy some hand sanitizer.”

  “Not anymore, you’re not. I’ll give it back to you soon, but I have to buy this for my mom. You said so yourself. So she won’t be jealous of the nice thing I did for my dad.”

  Margaret pinched her fingers around her pocketbook and shook her head. I turned my stingray eyes on her. But she just turned hers back on me. Sometimes I wish I’d never taught Margaret stingray eyes. Luckily, I never taught her high power, so I turned that on, and finally she gave up and handed over her brand-new, never-spent dollar bill.

  Eight dollars and sixty-six cents. “I still need eleven dollars and thirty-four cents,” I told everybody.

  “I don’t know how you do that, Clementine,” Mitchell said. “You’re amazing.” Then he pushed the stroller toward the door. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  “All right.” I patted the art box. “Don’t sell it yet, okay?” I said to the clerk. “Because I’m coming back.”

  Outside, I reminded Mitchell that I still needed to find a grocery store. “But not a regular one,” I said. “I need some new vegetable names.”

  He pointed down the street. “How about that?”

  I looked, and there was a grocery store, all right. LEE’S CHINESE MARKET read the sign over the door. And out on the sidewalk were bins of vegetables! I ran down the street. I’d never seen some of these vegetables before.

  “Bok choy, snow peas,” I read the signs. “Daikon, bamboo shoots.”

  “Do you have a pen?” I asked Mitchell when everyone caught up to me. “I want to write down some names.”

  Mitchell didn’t have anything in his pockets except a baseball.

  I didn’t bother asking Margaret, because she never carries anything with her that might leak out over her clothes.

  So we went inside. I was just about to ask the grocer for a pen when my amazing corner-eyes spotted something. I ran over.

  And you will not believe what I saw. Eels in a tank. Eels and eels and eels. The eels were swimming around, making knots and loops in the water, tying themselves all up and then untying themselves like magic.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Wow,” Mitchell said.

  “Wow,” Bok Choy said.

  “I’m going to throw up,” Margaret said.

  “They’re just fish, Margaret,” I told her. “They can’t help it if they’re extra long and slippery.”

  But Margaret had turned kind of green. “Quick!” I told her. “Run over there into the rice aisle. Just keep looking at all those bins of nice clean rice.” Margaret ran away and I turned back to those eels.

  Sometimes, on hot summer days, I like to make water paintings on the sidewalk in our back alley. How you make them is this: take a nice big paintbrush, dip it in water, then paint swirly lines on the cement. The swirly lines evaporate almost as fast as you can make them, so they almost look like they’re moving. Just like these eels.

  Oh—I forgot to say: ask your mother first about using her paintbrush.

  I pointed to the littlest one hiding in the corner. “Look how sad he looks.”

  “Eels can’t look sad,” Mitchell said. “They’re eels.”

  “He’s crying,” I said. “It’s just harder to tell underwater.”

  Mitchell made a face, but I saw him corner-eye the tank to see if it was true.

  “Special: five dollars and ninety-nine cents a pound,” I read the sign. “That’s a pretty good price for a pet,” I said.

  “This isn’t a pet shop, Clementine,” Mitchell said. “This is a grocery store. These eels are fo
r eating.”

  “Shhh,” I hissed at Mitchell for saying that in front of them.

  Mitchell shrugged. “Well, it’s true. People eat them. Or smoke them.”

  Margaret must have been listening from the rice aisle because we heard her yell, “Don’t let Alan hear about this! That pipe of his is disgusting enough.”

  A very small, secret part of me wanted to see someone smoking an eel. But not today. And not these eels. I went up to the counter.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the grocer. “Can I borrow a pen?”

  The grocer gave me one and I wrote my brother’s new vegetable names on my arm. “Excuse me,” I said again when I gave him back the pen. “Is your name Mr. Lee?”

  “Yes, it is,” he said.

  “Well, Lee is eel spelled backward. Isn’t that great? If I had a store and I was selling some things that were my name spelled backward, I’d stop selling them.”

  I had to stop for a minute to figure out what that would be. “Yep, if I had a store with some ‘Enitnemelc’s, I’d give them away as pets.”

  Mr. Lee just laughed, as if I’d told him a good joke.

  “See?” Margaret hissed in my ear. “He thinks you’re weird. You’re always doing weird things, Clementine.”

  I icicle-eyed Margaret and left, pushing Bamboo Shoot in his stroller.

  Margaret followed me. She pointed to the names on my arm. “That’s weird, too,” she said.

  I turned to Mitchell. “Do you think so? Do you think I do weird things?”

  “Of course,” he said. “That’s why I let you hang around with me.”

  Which he said because he was trying to be my boyfriend. I didn’t tell him I don’t want a boyfriend, because I didn’t want to crack his heart like in the movies. So instead, I asked him if he had any ideas about how I could earn twenty dollars for my mom’s present. He only came up with one: he could become a famous baseball player and get rich and then give me that much. I told him Thank you, but that would take too long.

  When I got back home, my mom was sitting at her drawing table. I pulled her change and the tube of permanent rose from my pocket.

  She held up her hands, which were covered with pastel dust. “Could you put it away for me?”

  I opened the cookie tin my mom uses for oil paints. All the tubes were jumbled up together—it looked beautiful to me, but it didn’t look anything like the shelves at the art store. I suddenly realized something: the art store person had put all the paints in order according to a rule. Not a dumb rule, like one of Margaret’s, but a good one. “Want me to arrange these in color wheel order?” I asked.

  “That would be nice, honey!” Mom said.

  So I laid out all the tubes of paint in a rainbow circle, just like they’d been at the art store. When I was finished Mom leaned over and took a look. “That’s wonderful,” she said. “Now I won’t waste time looking for a certain color. Could you do this for my watercolors and my colored pencils, too?”

  “Really?” I asked. “I can touch all your stuff?”

  “Sure.”

  “Even the special markers?”

  My mom looked at me for a minute, and I could see her thinking about the time I’d colored Margaret’s head with them.

  “Sure. I know you know the rules about my art supplies now. So any time you feel like straightening up my things, you can go ahead.”

  So I put all her stuff in color wheel order, and I secret-smiled all the time, thinking about how happy she was going to be when I gave her that deluxe art supplies organizer box.

  After that, I went into my parents’ room to see how my dad was coming with his book. Under

  he had written:

  I flipped the pad to see if he’d written any more about the interesting things on the next page. Nope. So it was up to me.

  I wrote.

  Then I went to put the stroller back into the storage room. On the way, I passed the trash-and-recycling room. And in there, I saw something that really was extra interesting: the solution to my deluxe art supplies organizer twenty dollar problem!

  “Clementine, that’s the third time I’ve found you staring at the clock today,” Mrs. Nagel said Wednesday morning. “Are you waiting for something to happen?”

  I felt my ears begin to burn. Mrs. Nagel kept looking at me. So even though I did not want to say what I was doing, I did.

  “I’m just playing Beat the Clock,” I said.

  “How do you play?” Joe asked.

  “I look at the clock, and then I look away and count the seconds and then look back to see how close I was. I’m getting really good. If I ever go on a game show where you have to guess how many seconds have gone by, I’m going to win. And I won’t pick the dumb prizes, let me tell you.”

  “All right,” said Mrs. Nagel. “I think that’s enough of that.”

  But it wasn’t enough. Everyone started to play Beat the Clock. Kids shouted, “Just two seconds off!” and “Eighteen seconds, I guessed it exactly!” and “You did not, I saw you peek at your watch!” until finally Mrs. Nagel taped a piece of construction paper over the clock.

  The back of her head sent me a look that said, Your teacher’s going to hear about this!

  I didn’t send her a look back, but if I had, it would have said, Good, because my teacher understands about Beat the Clock. He understands about how counting with one part of my mind helps me pay attention to him with the other. We have a little arrangement about that. And besides, if my teacher wanted to tell me to stop looking at the clock he wouldn’t have done it in front of the whole class. He would have held up his fingers to make a capital P for “in private.” Then I would have gone up to his desk and he would have talked to me there. And I miss my teacher a lot right now. So it’s a good thing he won’t be gone much longer. Which was too much to fit into a single look, anyway.

  The rest of the morning got worse. By the time the recess bell rang, I bet I heard a hundred “Clementine-pay-attention!”s. And every time, I was paying attention!

  But okay, fine, not to Mrs. Nagel, because she had gone from boring to extra-boring. Instead, I was paying attention to the astoundishing idea that had jumped into my head when I passed by the trash-and-recycling area last night. Which was the opposite of boring, believe me.

  “Twenty dollars, coming soon!” I wrote on my math paper.

  After a hundred hours, school was over. The bus ride took three hundred more hours. All everybody wanted to talk about was how nice Mrs. Nagel was, which showed that she had hypnotized everyone except me. Finally I was home.

  My mom was just about to leave with Bean Sprout to go to story hour at the library. She handed me a cup of yogurt and an apple. The apple reminded me about Monday’s science experiment, which made me feel a little bit bad. I stuffed it into my pocket.

  My mom leaned over to get a closer look at the back of my neck. “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” she said. Then she looked at my arms. “I’m going to have a talk with Margaret’s mother.”

  “They’re not all pinch marks,” I said. “Some of them are poke marks. The neck ones came from Lilly. My right side came from Norris-Boris-Morris and my left arm—”

  “A child is not a pincushion. Don’t they teach that in your school?”

  “It’s okay. I sit in front of Joe and Maria now. Joe’s too short to reach over his desk and Maria is a weak little pickle.” And then I thought of something. “Wait. Now that I think about it, Maria has extra-hard fingers. Pointy, too. And what if Joe uses his pencil? He might get me in the lungs or something. I guess I’d better not go to school for a while…like until Monday.…”

  “Don’t be silly. I’ll just write a note.… What did you say your substitute’s name is?”

  “No, Mom, don’t!”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ll just make it worse.”

  “Make what worse?”

  So I had to tell her about all the trouble I was having with Mrs. Nagel. And about Margaret’s idea about doing what Lil
ly did, which didn’t work, and having to move.

  My mom sat down beside me. “Well, I don’t think that was very good advice anyway,” she said. “It’s never a good idea to do something just because somebody else is doing it. So why do you think you’re having so much trouble?”

  I peeled the lid off my yogurt and licked it. “She doesn’t like me.”

  “Oh, that can’t be true!” my mom said. Which she had to say because she’s my mother. “There must be another reason. If you could figure it out, maybe you could fix things.”

  My mom grabbed Water Chestnut as he ran by and tried to put on his jacket. I watched for a while, but she wasn’t getting anywhere. “He’s playing Spaghetti Boy,” I explained. “Be Tree Boy,” I told him. “Make Branch Arms.” My brother got fooled by this and my mom got his jacket on.

  She zipped him up. “Thanks, Clementine. See what I mean? Sometimes you have to figure out the problem before you can figure out the solution.”

  That sounded like a good thing to remember, so I wrote it on my arm. My mom picked up my brother and carried him to the door because he was still being a tree. “Your father’s out back. The masons are here—they’re starting the new brick garden wall. Do you want to go watch them?”

  I dropped my spoon. I’d been waiting all month for this, because I love bricks. I love how pretty the white mortar looks next to the red clay. I love how each brick is set exactly halfway over the one beneath it, so each row ends with either a full brick or a half a brick. I love how even it is, all the way to the top of the wall, even if the wall is a hundred stories high.

  I love bricks so much that when my family made a gingerbread house last Christmas I made the sides of it with Dentyne gum for bricks and used frosting for mortar. It cost me two weeks allowance for all that gum, but it was worth it.

  I thought about how much I wanted to watch the masons. And then I thought of my mom’s present. “No thanks,” I said. “I have something to do this afternoon.”