100 Days and 99 Nights (5 page)
One really windy, cold day, Grandpa took us out to the playground. He said, “Don’t worry, March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb.”
Ike and I thought this was hilarious and laughed so hard we nearly burst, because everyone knows that if a lion is even near a lamb it eats it. The next week Grandpa brought me a cuddly lion and curly lamb. So far, I have to say, lying on my bed together, Larry my lion has been extremely polite to Lucy my lamb.
I
n history class, Ms. Pitcher taught us that a long time ago, in World War II, fought during my great-grandfather’s years, the children at home did many things to help the soldiers who were away. She said that this helping was called the “home front” because they did it right here at home in the good ol’ U.S. of A. and that it was a very important part of winning the war.
My hand shot up but before Ms. Pitcher could call on me I burst, “What can we do to help on this ‘home front’?”
“Please wait to be called on, Esme.”
“Yes, ma’am, but . . .”
“Does anyone have any ideas about what we can do to help?”
I swiveled my head to my classmates. Some were deep-thinking, others confused. Richie and Georgina sat in the back, with bored to pieces expressions, passing notes and not paying much attention, which is what they did best.
Pedro, who had taken my second-choice part in the play, piped in, “At my house before we go to sleep we pray for all the soldiers’ safe return.”
“Good, Pedro. That is something. What else? Something more . . .”
The lunch bell rang a sudden end to the discussion. Richie and Georgina, no longer bored to pieces, brown lunch bags clasped in hands, led the class’s hungry charge from the room.
Sitting on the seesaw at recess up and downing across from Martina, it began bothering me. We weren’t doing anything to help on our home front except worrying, and I wasn’t sure that really helped at all.
“What do you think about the home front?” I questioned up the slanted wood.
“I liked it better when we were learning about the Minutemen. In a minute they would rush out of their houses and hide in the woods to get them lobsterbacks . . . lobsterbacks!” Martina giggled, straightened her legs, and launched me back down.
My imagination drifted off to lines of live lobsters marching through the dirt streets, claws gripping muskets, antennae sticking out of pointy red hats. Then I thought of the children during the World War helping the soldiers on the home front. We weren’t doing anything. . . .
“Let me down, Esme,” Martina moaned from the upside of the seesaw, but I was thinking so hard I didn’t hear a word and didn’t budge.
“Let me down! Esme!” Martina cried. But my mind was in another country.
“Esmerelda Swishback McCarther!” commanded Principal Pershing from near the swings. “You let her down this minute!”
And being a good soldier, I did. Martina hit hard. There was crying. We ended up in the school office, sitting on the pen-scarred wooden bench under the kindergarten’s rows of blue construction paper pictures. “It was an accident, I swear. I would never do anything to hurt you. I am sorry,” I apologized. Which was totally true, so although Martina’s bottom was still sore, she nodded that she believed me, and although Principal Pershing was still totally sore, she nodded and believed me too.
“Back to class, you two.”
“But . . .”
Before our principal could turn and retreat into her office I explained what we had learned in class and asked, “What can we do to help on our home front?”
I flashed a hopeful look at Martina. Someone in such a principal position would have an easy solution to this hard home front problem.
“All do what they can,” she commented, “and there’s not much we can do.”
My stomach felt like the trapeze artist who just missed grabbing her partner’s hands. It flipped and flopped, tumbling down toward my feet.
Martina stopped sobbing, screwed up her face, and stated, “My mom says in the marines there is always something we can do.”
I felt that Martina would one day make a top-dog marine.
Martina gave me my monkey. One rainy playdate she pulled it from her backpack and placed it onto my bedzoo, sliding it between Mandrake my scruffy-whiskered muskrat and Lucy my snowy-haired lamb.
“I don’t have any animals with X to give you but I was wondering if you had room for another M?”
“Sure I do. Thanks.”
“My great-aunt Joan gave it to me.”
I calm-waited for the rest of the story, since no one gave away a perfectly good monkey, even to a best friend.
“I named it after her husband, who she doesn’t like so much anymore. And if she doesn’t like him anymore, neither do I.”
“Oh.”
“It reminds me of him. If you could not change his first name it would probably make him feel better. The thing is, it doesn’t start with an M. It’s Karl, with a K.”
She was worried that since the monkey’s first name did not start with the same letter as his last name (monkey), like my other animals, it might get teased.
“The others will treat him like their best friend no matter what his name is. And look . . .”
I picked Karl up from between Mandrake and Lucy and moved him exactly one spot over to the right.
“See, now he sits next to my nightingale — Florence.”
This showed Martina that there would be no teasing on my bed and that her monkey would be in good company.
So that is how I adopted Karl the monkey.
M
y hand was already up as Ms. Pitcher turned from the blackboard where she had just pink-chalk-written 4 x 4 = ______.
“Esme?”
“We didn’t finish talking about what we can do to help on our home front.”
“It’s math, not history,” whined Georgina, who paid just as little attention to one as to the other.
“Shhhh,” growled Martina in a way that made Georgina sink deep into her chair, cross her arms, and look down.
Math is my favorite subject, but this was more important than worrying about favorites.
“That is true, Georgina, but this is important,” agreed our teacher as if she were reading my mind. “Let’s take a few minutes to finish. Suggestions?”
Whew, do I like Ms. Pitcher. To make sure the pouting Georgina got the message loud and clear Martina continued to stare at her. Whew, do I like Martina.
Hands shot up, whispered ideas crisscrossed desks, and shouted suggestions bounced off the blackboard, followed by the stern “Wait your turn, children.” There were so many ideas that Ms. Pitcher had to erase 1 x 1 = ______, 2 x 2 = ______, 3 x 3 = ______ and the recently written 4 x 4= ______ to write them all down. The board was chock-f of suggestions that went from the kooky and crazy (“We should fly over there and drop candy.”) to the possible, doable, but not really helpful (“We should draw pictures and write letters.”). After a trillion ideas, the exhausted class went silent.
“We will just be in the way,” barked Richie, eyes narrowed and arms folded, chin stubbornly pasted down on his neck. He looked like one of those flat-headed angry dogs that Dad always told us to stay clear of. Martina moved her head slightly right so Richie could just barely see the whites of her eyes. He choked on his next sentence, not letting it fully leave his mouth. It sounded like a turkey gobble. Everyone laughed.
“Class,” called Ms. Pitcher to quiet us.
The thought of not doing anything made my body feel like a pirate’s spyglass collapsing down, until it was small enough to fit in a pocket. “We’ll vote. That’s the democratic thing to do,” decided Ms. Pitcher.
“Yes, the democratic thing,” repeated Martina, her eyeballs still cruelly shifted toward Richie.
“Absolutely demm-ooo-crat-tic,” I drawled slowly. I wasn’t exactly sure what it meant we would do but knew that it was better than big Richie’s and little Georgina’s bitter frowns.
“Raise your hands if you want to do something to help.”
I held my breath, raised my hand, and closed my eyes. As if in a deep sleep I could barely hear Ms. Pitcher’s voice counting, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. . . . I couldn’t keep my eyes closed and my breath held any longer — breathe — open — so many hands were raised!
We voted (which was “the democratic thing to do”), and decided 23–2 (you can guess who the two were) that we would, just like the children of World War II, do many things on the home front over here to help our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and friends over there.
I was so proud of my class . . . and Martina . . . and my teacher . . . and myself.
Mom’s first cousin, Curtis, stayed with us in Frankfurt for a week and gave me my little baby blue nightingale. Until Karl the monkey arrived, this bird was the single exception to my rule of making my stuffed animals’ first names start with the same letter as their last. I couldn’t resist naming her Florence after a famous nurse I had read a picture book about.
M
s. Pitcher explained that just like in World War II, gasoline was very important, and that every gallon of it we saved meant the soldiers might return home one precious minute sooner.
Those of us who could, rode our bicycles to school so our parents didn’t have to drive us. Ike and I had to get up a full thirty minutes earlier so we would not be late. But we were so happy that we were helping that it didn’t matter one eye-o-tah (which was a word Mom used that meant “not even a little bit”). We would glide down our driveway and sharp-turn up our street, and as we hard-pumped, others would fall in behind. With a tail of ten kids, including Pedro and Bridget, we neared midway, and we didn’t have to slow down even a bit as Martina fell in on her banana seat, pink-tasseled handlebarred bike and delivered a big “Ooooh Raaaah!” which is Marine talk for “I am here and happy about it.”
A block later, Ike’s friend Stony Jackson would rip down his steep driveway and pedal alongside Ike, yackety-yakking until a car would come and he would have to grudgingly fall in behind my brother. Once the car passed, Stony would double-pedal-pump and catch up to Ike to continue their chatter. When our troop of kids turned into the school parking lot, Ms. Pitcher and several other teachers would welcome us with applause and help us lock up our bikes. I loved helping on the home front because it made me feel like I was part of the good ol’ U.S. of A, which made me feel like I was part of the army, which made me feel like I was part of my dad.
Every day in every way we careful-conserved. Four people in a car, lights off when you left a room, and when it got cold we wore sweaters inside instead of turning up the heat. It was simple math: if we collected enough saved seconds, they would grow into minutes, the minutes would grow into hours, and the hours into days, and then soon our parents would be on their way home.
We combed our brains and searched our textbooks to find other ways to help our home front.
Bridget, whose brother was in the navy, suggested going door-to-door selling war bonds to our neighbors like they did in World War II, to help buy things for the fight. But when we asked Bridget’s uncle who worked downtown at the savings and loan bank, we found there were no bonds to sell, which was okay since we didn’t know exactly what they were anyway.
Arthur, whose dad was in the air force, read in a book that many families grew “victory gardens” in their yards. They would grow vegetables so that the soldiers had plenty. I thought it would be a good idea if we didn’t eat any of our vegetables so the soldiers would have more. No more broccoli, green beans, or spinach for us! Ms. Pitcher didn’t think that was such a good idea. So, after school we went over to Arthur’s house, dragged shovels from the garage, and tried to dig up the backyard to plant all sorts of seeds, from corn to zucchini, every vegetable except for peas, since Martina thought they tasted like little green boogers.
The dirt was frozen solid. No matter how hard we hit the shovels down, they just clanged on the ground. We all agreed it was best to wait for the spring to start our “victory garden.”
Martina, who had thought about our problem for many an hour, suggested that like the children did during World War II, we should have a scrap metal drive. Scrap metal is any piece of metal that is garbage here but can be melted down and shaped into armor to protect our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and friends over there.
“We can’t do that,” moaned Pedro, “we’re too small.”
Martina turned to her side, made a big muscle, and stated in no uncertain terms, “We can do it!”
And so we did.
An octopus has eight arms that all work together. Ollie my octopus has only seven, since for no good reason Napoleon chewed one off. A sevetopus? Was I mad? You bet!
T
hat next Sunday was the Abraham Lincoln Elementary School’s very first scrap metal drive. Martina and I dragged our wagons up Concord Court and down Sumter Street, past Flanders Way and across Lexington Avenue, collecting any rusted old remains. We found seventeen empty food cans, a hubcap, six pieces of pipe, and many parts that came from machines that we could not identify.
On the corner of Gold and Juno Streets we hit the jackpot.
“Look!” squealed Martina.
“Oh, my! It’s huge. This will protect, like, a whole army.”
Squatting on the curb like a giant rusted accordion was an abandoned radiator. We eased our wagon alongside. Martina went to one end and I to the other.
“One,” she started.
“Two,” I added.
“THREE!!” we yelled, and lifted. It didn’t move one inch.
We counted again and then again, switched sides, bent our knees, used our heads, but no matter how hard we pushed or pulled it wouldn’t budge. Resting on the curb, we did not admit defeat. Instead, we decided to return with help to collect this great iron prize. We took a deep breath, let out a big “Ooooh Raaah!” and continued on our metal collecting way.
“It’s too bad we don’t need plastic, “ observed Martina as we headed home. We had come across tons of garbage made of plastic.
“Or single shoes,” I added, because as we dragged our wagon here and there, we came across many scrumpled old solitary shoes, boots, and sneakers lying lonely in the gutter.
“I wonder why there is always only one and never a pair,” questioned Martina.
“Weird . . . maybe a pirate captain with a peg leg lives around here.” I limped along.
“Could be, could be . . .” Martina giggled. “Or maybe a flamingo who doesn’t like to get her pants dirty.”
She stopped and bird-posed, putting her left foot on her right knee and her hands under her armpits.
I shrieked.
We dragged our clattering junk down the streets, making up hilarious single shoe stories. As we broke the early Sunday morning silence, curtains slow-rose, doors slammed, and car engines started — we had woken our neighbors from their sleep.
At the center of our dead-end street, we dumped our collected junk. Soon other classmates turned the corner with their overflowing carts.
“Did you guys come up with any good single shoe stories?” Martina wondered.
Our friends stopped laughing and stared at us as if we had just landed from a faraway planet.
“What kind of stories?” asked Bridget.
“Never mind.”
Our tangled pile of rusted metal grew as each wagon was unloaded.
“It looks like museum art,” said my mom, admiring the collection.
Together, Martina’s and my head cocked to the side, like Napoleon’s when he hears a strange sound. It didn’t look anything like art to me — it looked exactly like a pile of junk.
Our neighbors noticed this super start and pitched in. They emptied their houses of useless metal and added it to our huge collection. Soon many broken machines, tangled hangers, and boxes of dented cans were brought and piled high. Several people mentioned that it was an extremely patriotic thing we were doing. We held our chins to the sky, proud of our work.
Ancient Mrs. Wood, widowed once in the Great War, and then again in the next, pushed a misplaced car fender four blocks in her shopping cart.
“Bella,” my mother cautioned, “you shouldn’t have done that.”
“All for a good cause,” she cracked smartly. Then with her long ringed fingers creaking under the strain, she pried open a large tin of her famous homemade gingersnaps. The price we paid for taking one or two of these circular treats was to listen to her tales about the way times used to be. It wasn’t too high a price because the snaps were A-number-one — and so were her stories.
She had crossed our country from the Empire State Building to the Grand Canyon and traveled this earth from the pyramids of Egypt to the Great Wall of China and met all sorts of strange and wonderful people along the way.
“I have sat down and broken bread with kings and criminals,” she elegantly explained, her silver-frosted curls wobbling as she nodded.
“Once while traveling to Tombouctou I was wooed by a quite handsome prince of the desert. If I had married that gentleman, I can assure you I would not be sitting on a curb in Alexandria, Virginia, eating gingersnaps with you girls. I can tell you that. No, indeed, I would be sitting on a jeweled throne, the queen of all the lands stretching from Tombouctou, on through Tomboucthree to the mountains past Tomboucsix!”
Martina and I smiled, wondering how fun it would be to have her on top of the playground jungle gym for our imaginary games.
Mrs. Wood sucked in her powdered cheeks and described how heroically handsome her husband had looked in his doughboy uniform.
“Doughnut uniform?” asked Ike, thinking that after devouring three gingersnaps he was going to get something else to eat.
“Doughboys were what they called the soldiers of the first war. I do not know why,” she said. “Maybe you could look that up for me, Isaac. The why of doughboys.”
Ike winced at her use of his full-out first name — maybe because he didn’t like it, maybe because the last time he heard it was when Dad told us he was going away. He mumbled in that Ike way when someone gave him work he didn’t want to do.
Mrs. Wood didn’t comment on the mumble. The slack skin around her faded gray eyes folded as she squinted into the distance. It was as if our street did not end in a curbed circle ten yards from where we sat cross-legged, but extended out in a straight line for miles and miles toward the afternoon’s falling sun, and she could see her “doughboy” as clearly, right then and there, as if he were marching home to her in the real here and now.
“That was the war to end all wars,” she commented to no one in particular.
When Mrs. Wood was done telling about her terrific travels and we were done devouring her terrific snaps, she shook her head, pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth, and made an amazed clucking sound. Then, with a girlish giggle, she tossed the empty cookie tin into our metallic mound, leaned on her cart for support, and wheeled away.
Martina’s and my smile did not last long. The single most nastiest man on the block, Mr. Wormser, who kept each and every baseball accidentally batted into his bushes and promised to pull off our noses if we ever set one foot on his property, came shuffling toward us. His cane kicking out, his crooked smile pulled to one side of his lightbulb-like bald head, he held tightly in his bony hand one single bent fork.
“Oh, my goodness gracious!” he crazy-croaked at our pile. “You children just remember it is easier to get into something than to get out of it.”
“Yes, sir,” Pedro and Ike dutifully responded to the grouch, respecting their elders even though what he said made less sense than Ike Sense at its worst.
“Fustilug” slipped out. Martina looked at me with a big question mark written across her face. But before I could erase it, Mom glanced at me with a sharp warning look that quickly slow-melted into a knowing smile that made me feel warm inside.
Mr. Wormser turned his slanted face toward Martina and me, cleared his throat with a big attention-getting “AHEM,” and adjusted his thin round eyeglasses as if he were trying to get us into crisp clear focus.
“You’re welcome.”
He testily chucked his fork on top of our mountain of scrap. It made a lonely triangle-like tinkle as it found its way to the very bottom of our pile. As he crankily caned away, we silent-hoped he wouldn’t look or come back.
“All do what they can, children,” commented Ms. Pitcher, echoing our principal, and then to try and make us better understand added, “You work with the neighbors you have. They’re not always the neighbors you might want or wish to have.” Then she shrugged as if to tell us that in the case of Mr. Wormser there was absolutely positively nothing we could do.