Penelope Crumb Never Forgets (4 page)

6.

W
hat are you doing in there?” asks Littie Maple.

I stick my head out from inside my closet. “Nothing.” I throw the last of my shoes and hang-up clothes onto the Heap. Which now comes up to Littie’s eyeballs.

“It doesn’t look like nothing.” Littie grabs my pair of my polka-dotted rain boots from the Heap and holds them up to her feet. She tells me I must be related to Sasquatch and then throws the boots back on the pile. She finds a pair of my sandals and buckles them over her socks. “Can I have these,” she asks, “if you’re going to throw them out?”

“I’m not throwing them out,” I tell her.

“Oh.” Littie clunks over to my dresser and kicks up her leg to try to get a look at her foot in the mirror. “I really like them. I’m just saying. And they fit me perfect.”

I give Littie a look that says, That’s a Good One. But I don’t say anything about the sandals, because if she doesn’t know she has tiny bird feet, then I’m not going to be the one to tell her.

“Is your brother at home?” asks Littie.

“I hope not.”

“Remember the other day when he pulled my hair?” she says, standing on her tiptoes.

“I don’t know. I guess.”

“Remember? We were out there by the couch and he was going somewhere, because he just put his jacket on and he said something to you and then he pulled on my hair? Remember?”

I shrug and push some of my clothes and shoes to the top of the Heap.

“I mean, on a regular day, he usually pays no attention to me at all. Doesn’t even say hello or anything. But the other day, he pulled my hair . . . You really don’t remember?” she says, folding her arms across her chest. But when I don’t answer, she says, “
I
do. I remember.”

“You can tell Mom if you want,” I say. “Terrible pulls my hair and does worse to me all the time and hardly ever gets into trouble, but maybe if you told Mom, she would do something.”

“I don’t want to get him into trouble,” she says, and her face turns red. “That’s not what I’m after.”

“Then what?”

“Nothing, Penelope,” she says. “Nothing.”

“Why are you so bothered about Terrible, anyway?”

She unbuckles my sandals and kicks them off. “Never mind.”

I crawl into my empty closet, curl into a corner, and run my hand over the white walls. If Mister Leonardo da Vinci were here, he would surely say, “My goodness, thank lucky stars for such a place as this. Oh me, oh my, indeed the plain walls should not be plain for long.” Because that is how dead artists talk.

Littie clucks her tongue like a pigeon from the other side of the Heap. And then maybe because sitting in an empty closet makes my brains work better, all of a sudden it hits me why Littie is so bothered about Terrible. I grab a shoe from the bottom of the Heap and throw it at her. My aim must be pretty good, because she lets out a yowl. “What the heck did you do that for?”

“Because, Littie Maple, if you’re meaning to say that you like Terrible the space alien, blech, then maybe you’re an alien, too.” I crawl back into my closet and prop my feet against the wall.

“What are you doing in there?”

“Nothing,” I say.

Her clucks get louder. “Well, what are you doing with all this stuff out here? And don’t say ‘nothing.’”

“I just don’t want it in my closet.”

“Why not?” she says.

I sigh. “Because.”

“Because why?”

“My closet isn’t going to be a closet anymore, that’s why.”

“What’s it going to be?”

I can almost hear Leonardo say, “I am simply unable to think with all this clucking in my ears. Thank lucky stars that this wonderful room has a door.”

I tell Littie that I don’t know what it’s going to be.

“You don’t know?” she says. I bet she’s got her hands on her hips now. “Penelope Crumb, if you don’t want to tell me what you’re doing, then just say you don’t want to tell me instead of saying you don’t know. Because if you—”

“Okay, Littie,” I say. “I don’t really want to tell you.”

“You don’t want to tell me!” she yells. “Well, that’s just a bruise on a banana, isn’t it! Why? Why don’t you want to—”

I close the closet door then, and the clucking stops soon after. “Ah, how lovely and quiet when the pigeon leaves the windowsill,” Leonardo would say. “Now, let’s get to thinking. Whose things are you going to put in this wonderful museum of yours?”

7.

I
call Patsy Cline the next day. “Do you want to come over?”

“It’s Sunday,” she says. “I’ve got practice.”

“Oh, right,” I say. “I forgot.” I tap my brains to wake them up. “Maybe I could come over, then?”

Patsy doesn’t say anything. But I can tell she’s still there because I can hear her mom in the background calling her to come finish her scrambled eggs. “I guess that would be okay,” she says finally.

I hang up the phone and yell to Mom, “I’m going over to Patsy Cline’s!”

Patsy lives two metro stops away. On the train, I flip the handle of my toolbox back and forth, while my stomach does some flipping of its own. “I hope I’m not getting the stomach flu,” I tell my stomach. The man sitting next to me says, “I hope not, too,” and then he changes seats.

When I finally get to Patsy’s building, my stomach is making all kinds of noises, and I’m worried the elevator might not be fast enough. But then as I’m getting ready to knock on Patsy’s door, my heart is really pounding, and I know that what I have isn’t the flu: It’s nerves.

I don’t know why I would be nervous about visiting Patsy Cline, whom I have visited more times than I can count, but I take a deep breath and try to slow my heart. Then I knock.

Patsy Cline’s dog, Roger, barks and scratches at the door. I can hear Patsy tell Roger to keep it down, and then the door opens. There’s Patsy in her blue cowgirl outfit with Roger tucked under her arm. “Howdy,” she says.

As soon as I see her, my nerves go away, but then I see her
FRIENDS FOREVER
necklace around her neck, and my stomach does another flip. It doesn’t help that Roger, who has a face like a vampire bat and is missing a great number of his teeth, growls and lunges at me like he wants to gum me to death. With a face like that, Roger should thank lucky stars he doesn’t have a tail, because if Patsy Cline hadn’t adopted him, he’d still be at that shelter. Or worse.

“He’s having one of his bad days,” Patsy explains.

It’s not easy being a dog when you’re missing your tail, I guess. “I know the feeling,” I say quietly, and follow her inside. Somehow between the knock and Roger’s bad day, I decide the best thing to do is to keep talking and not let there be any empty space, because empty space will leave room for Vera Bogg. So right away I tell her about how Mr. Drather was singing a Patsy Cline song on the bus the day of the field trip and how I drew a picture of him and about how I think he wants to be a singer but is driving a school bus now instead. And how I had forgotten to tell her about that on the way home from the Portwaller History Museum on account of the fact that my brains were on Miss Stunkel and the note she sent home.

And then without giving that story a chance to settle, I start telling the one about Mandrake. But before I can even get to the part about Grandpa Felix’s camera, the one we decided to name Alfred, Patsy’s mom says from the other room, “Patsy, let’s run through this song one more time.”

“Hi, Mrs. Watson,” I yell.

Patsy’s mom says, “Honey child!” Patsy’s mom always calls me honey child. And especially today it sounds so nice when she says it. A child made of honey. That’s what she thinks of me. And then she says this: “You make yourself right at home, Vera. Patsy has just about got this song handled.”

And that’s when I just about go dead. I know I do, because all of a sudden, I can’t feel my tongue, and I can’t feel my toenails. And I wonder how long I have until my heart stops going.

Patsy Cline’s face turns bright red. “It’s not Vera,” she yells to her mom. “It’s Penelope.”

“Oh, no matter,” says her mom. As if Vera is also made out of honey. Which I know she definitely is not. Then Mrs. Watson tells me to make myself at home anyway. But she doesn’t call me honey child. Not even once.

I wait for Patsy in her room. She’s got shelves and shelves of trophies for singing, and a big poster of Patsy Cline, the dead country-western singer, above her bed. I plop down on her bed and close my eyes. I know this room by heart. With my eyes closed, I make a list from my memory of everything in the room.

Thirteen gold trophies, three silver ones, four blue ribbons, one red, a Patsy Cline poster, green bedspread with tiny yellow butterflies and curtains to match, yellow shaggy rug, white desk and chair, blue plastic bins filled with her cow collection, a keyboard with a microphone, and a lamp with a cow-print shade. Patsy Cline really likes cows.

I open my eyes and check my memory. Pretty good, except I forgot about the framed picture of me and Patsy on the roller coaster at FantasyLand last summer. And also there are fourteen gold trophies—somehow I missed one. I kneel on her bed and pull down the last trophy in the lineup. It’s small, but heavy, and the gold part is in the shape of a music note. At the base, there’s an engraving:
PATSY CLINE ROBERTA WATSON. FIRST PLACE. PORTWALLER’S TALENTED VOICES.

I turn over the trophy in my hand and wonder if one day I will forget about Patsy Cline, about our trip to FantasyLand, about how much she likes cows. Just like how Grandpa one day stopped thinking about Mandrake Trout and then forgot all about him.

There is one way to make sure I don’t forget. I open my toolbox and try to stuff the trophy inside. Only, it doesn’t fit too good because of all the other stuff I keep in there. So I dump out my drawing pad and pencils, markers, shoehorn, flashlight, change purse, granola bar, and then try again. The top of the music note scrapes against the side of my toolbox. I push down the lid, but it won’t close all the way.

As soon as I open the toolbox again to try one more time, Patsy Cline walks in singing, “Worry, why do I let myself worry? Wondering what in the world did I do?” Then she sees me stuffing her trophy into my toolbox and says, “What in the world?”

“Oh,” I say, yanking the trophy out of my toolbox. I put it back on the shelf and tell Patsy that I was going to draw it while I waited for her to finish her singing practice and that I wanted to see if it would fit in my toolbox, just because. And then I say, “I can fit a whole egg in my mouth.”

Patsy gives me a look that says, You Are Crazier Than Roger.

While I put all my things back in my toolbox, I change the subject. “Want to go to the park?”

“What for?” she says.

What for? I don’t know what kind of a dumb question that is, because what does anybody go to the park for? But I don’t say that because that’s not the kind of thing you say to your best friend. Instead, I say, “To spin on the turnabout until we get so dizzy we can’t walk straight.”

Patsy Cline says, “No, thanks.”

I tap my brains to get them going. “How about a staring contest?”

Patsy smiles, and then her eyes pop wide open. I’m an excellent starer. But Patsy is the All-Time Best, and she knows it. She can stare at you for so long that she doesn’t even see you anymore, and she can keep on staring even after you’ve given up and gone home for supper. It’s a little creepy, truth be told.

I set my eyes on her left eyebrow, which I named Marge because it looks like a caterpillar. I stare at Marge for a long time without blinking, seems like days. I stare so long and so hard that my eyes start to water, which is usually how it goes. Marge gets all blurry, and then it happens. I blink.

Patsy gets a big smile on her face, the kind of smile that makes me think we’re still best friends, even if she is still wearing that necklace, and then she says, “Want to go again?”

8.

A
n empty museum is nothing more than a closet. This is what I tell Leonardo da Vinci while I sit in the dark. If he were really here, he would surely say, “A museum does not make itself.”

“I tried to get Patsy Cline’s trophy,” I tell him. If only my toolbox were bigger. “Why do they have to make trophies so big, anyway?”

“I know nothing of trophies,” he would say. “In my day, people did not get statuettes for singing, only for jousting. I should have liked to receive one for my paintings, I do believe.”

“But I still don’t know what to put in my museum.”

“What you need, little darling, is what every artist needs. Some inspiration.”

“Inspiration,” I repeat.

The laundry room is where I find some. I pull a handful of drawing pencils and paintbrushes from the mason jars lined up on the dryer/desk and tuck them under my arm. Then I grab a couple tubes of paint—raw sienna, lemon yellow, and my favorite: ultramarine. I like to say it out loud.
Ultramarine. Ultramarine.
Because it’s not just marine. It’s
ultra
marine.

I stuff the tubes into my pocket.

When I turn around, there’s the alien behind me. Aliens have the quietest footsteps, and you can’t hear them coming. That makes them very good at the sneak attack.

“What are you doing?” says Terrible.

I answer with a question of my own. “What are
you
doing?”

He gives me a Hairy Eyeball, but I sidestep past him and head to my room before he can do any of his alien mind tricks on me.

I pull the paint tubes from my pockets, and I look at the white walls of my closet. Before this can really be a museum, it needs a name. I tap my head to get my brains started and then, after a while, I come up with one. Brain wrinkles are amazing things.

I paint in big
ultra
marine letters on the wall:

PENELOPE CRUMB’S ULTRA MUSEUM OF PEOPLE WHO WON’T BE FORGOTTEN EVEN AFTER THEY ARE GRAVEYARD DEAD

The letters go the whole way across the one wall and then turn the corner and go across the next one.

“That’s a mouthful,” Leonardo would say.

I make some changes.

PENELOPE CRUMB’S ULTRA MUSEUM OF PEOPLE WHO
WON’T BE FORGOTTEN EVEN AFTER THEY ARE GRAVEYARD DEAD
SHOULDN’T BE FORGOTTEN

PENELOPE CRUMB’S ULTRA MUSEUM OF
PEOPLE WHO WON’T BE FORGOTTEN EVEN AFTER THEY ARE GRAVEYARD DEAD SHOULDN’T BE FORGOTTEN
FORGET-ME-NOTTERS

I can practically hear Leonardo say, “Now
that
is ultra good.”

And it is. Having a name is a good start, and while the paint dries, I get out my drawing pad and pencil and make a list of all the people I don’t want to forget about:

Mom

Grandpa Felix

Dad

Nanny and Pop-Pop

Aunt Renn

Uncle Cleigh

Patsy Cline Roberta Watson

Terrence (my brother, not the alien)

Littie Maple

Penelope Crumb’s Ultra Museum of Forget-Me-Notters doesn’t have any glass display cases like the ones at the Portwaller History Museum, so a dinner plate from our kitchen cupboard will have to do. I pull out the first thing for my museum from my toolbox—my dad’s shoehorn. It’s silver metal and gleams except for the curved part in the center, where I imagine the rubbing of my dad’s heel took the shine off. I look into the shiny part and can see some of me in the reflection.

I put the shoehorn on the plate and then slide it to the center of the floor. Then I make a card that says