Poor Mallory! Read online

“You guys are jerks!” Amanda shouted suddenly.

  “No, we aren’t. You are!” Angie retorted.

  “Jerk, jerk, jerk!” chanted Max.

  Timmy looked haughty. “I’m rubber, you’re glue, and whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you. So you’re the jerk, Max.”

  “Okay, okay, okay,” said Stacey firmly. “Enough. I’m in charge here. And I’m mostly in charge of Amanda and Max, and they don’t want to play in the pool anymore. So, everybody out!”

  Heaving great, exaggerated sighs, Huck, Angie, and Timmy got out of the pool. Max and Amanda brightened.

  “Let’s play dress-ups,” Amanda said to Angie and Karen.

  “Let’s play dinosaurs,” Max said to Huck and Timmy.

  But Huck and Timmy were heading for the gate in the fence. “No, thanks,” said Huck.

  And Angie was gathering up her towel and a sundress. “I’m going to the Millers’,” she informed everyone. “I’ll practice in their pool.”

  Huck, Timmy, and Angie left.

  Stacey looked at the distraught, confused faces of Max and Amanda. She wasn’t sure what to say to them. So she was relieved when Karen spoke up.

  “Do you have any new dress-up clothes?” Karen asked Amanda. Then she added, “It doesn’t matter if you do or not. You know what? We haven’t played Lovely Ladies in a long time. Do you still have your Lovely Ladies clothes?”

  Amanda nodded, trying not to cry.

  “Well, then,” said Stacey brightly, “why don’t you two go upstairs, take off your wet suits, and turn yourselves into Lovely Ladies? Max, what do you want to do? You could invite another friend over.”

  Max shook his head. He and Stacey were following the girls into the house.

  “Would you like me to read to you?” Stacey asked him.

  “I guess.” Max shrugged.

  “Okay.” Stacey waited for Max to get dressed. Then she settled down with him in the Delaneys’ immaculate white playroom and read him book after book. Max only half listened to the stories.

  And from the sounds of things in Amanda’s room, the game of Lovely Ladies was only halfhearted.

  At home, our days fell into a pattern that was different from (but also similar to) the one we had had before Dad lost his job. Our family continued to get up at six-thirty in the morning on weekdays. My brothers and sisters and I got up then so we would arrive at school on time. Mom got up then so she would be ready if the agency called and said she had a job somewhere that day. And Dad got up then in case Mom did have a job. Then he would help fix breakfast and get us kids off to school.

  When we came home in the afternoon, Dad would be looking for a job. He spent a lot of time poring over the want ads in the paper and even more time on the phone. I looked at the want-ads section once after Dad had been through it. Some of the little boxes were circled in pencil, some were circled vigorously in ink, and others had been circled with a red felt-tip pen. Phone numbers and names were scribbled all up and down the margins of the pages.

  Claire complained, “Daddy never plays with me after he picks me up from school. He just sits in the kitchen and works.”

  “He’s trying to find another job,” I told her. “That’s very important, remember? He needs a job so he can earn money again.”

  “So I can get the Skipper doll?”

  “So you can get the Skipper doll.”

  Meanwhile, Mom had gone out on pretty many jobs. I couldn’t tell if she liked what she was doing or not. Most of the jobs were secretarial. Mom said she would type letters for people and file papers and answer telephones. She made the work sound boring, but to me, it sounded better than changing sheets and ironing clothes at home, although not better than the volunteer work my mother does. Mom said she liked word processing, though. She likes computers, which I hadn’t expected, and seems to know a lot about them, which I also hadn’t expected.

  After about two weeks of this routine, things changed slightly. Mom was working three or four days a week. But Dad seemed to have slowed down his job hunt.

  “Why?” I asked him.

  “Because I’ve exhausted most of the possibilities,” he replied. “I’m beginning to see the same jobs listed over and over in the paper. I’ve sent out copies of my résumé, I’ve made phone calls. Now there’s nothing left to do except wait for people to call and say they want to arrange interviews.”

  Dad looked discouraged — and right when I thought he should be feeling good. He’d done all the hard work. Now he just had to sit back and wait for the phone to ring.

  One Tuesday, not long after Dad said he’d “exhausted the possibilities,” I came home from school earlier than usual. I had no sitting job that afternoon, and school had come to an abrupt end ten minutes before the final bell because we’d had a false fire alarm. I parked my bike in our garage and ran inside, expecting to find Dad in the kitchen with the paper.

  Instead, I found him sprawled in an easy chair in the rec room. He was wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt, and these awful old slippers that the triplets tease him about. Next to him was a box of crackers, half empty, and in his hand was a glass of something. The TV was playing — a game show was on, I think — but Dad didn’t seem to be paying attention to it. His eyes were aimed in the direction of the TV set, but I could tell he was not trying to come up with the answer to the clue “favorite clothing of idiots.” (The answer was “dunce caps.”)

  And I hoped he hadn’t been watching TV all day. He would make our electricity bill too high.

  “Dad?” I said. “Where’s Claire?”

  “Huh?” I realized that although I had not been quiet about coming home, Dad hadn’t been aware of my presence until I spoke. “Oh, hi, Mal,” he said absently.

  “Hi. Where’s Claire?” I repeated.

  “Claire? She was here awhile ago.” Dad glanced around the room until his eyes settled on the TV screen again.

  “Claire? Claire!” I called. I dropped my books on the floor and ran upstairs to the kitchen. On the way, I imagined two things. 1. Claire was missing. 2. Claire had taken advantage of things and made a huge mess somewhere. I decided the second possibility was more likely. But I was wrong. Claire was neither missing nor a mess. She was sitting on her bed in the room she shares with Margo, playing with two old baby dolls.

  “Bad!” she was saying to one of the dolls. “Bad girl. You put that back. You can’t have it. Daddy is fired now.”

  She turned to the other doll. “Stop it!” she cried. “Quit pestering me. I just told you — you can’t have a new Skipper. And that’s final!”

  “Hi, Claire,” I said.

  Claire dropped the dolls and glanced up, looking somewhat guilty. “Hi,” she replied.

  “Have you been playing up here all afternoon?” I asked her.

  “Pretty much,” said Claire. “I went downstairs three times to ask Daddy to play with me, and he just said, ‘Not now.’”

  “Did Daddy give you lunch after school?”

  “He said I could have whatever I wanted.”

  “What did you want?”

  “Twinkies, but we didn’t have any.” Claire’s chin was trembling.

  “So you didn’t eat?”

  Claire shook her head. “Daddy is an old silly-billy-goo-goo.”

  I sat down on the bed and put my arms around my sister.

  * * *

  I don’t know for sure what Dad did the next afternoon, because it was Wednesday and I sat at the Delaneys’ and then went to Claudia’s for the BSC meeting. I think Dad did pretty much the same things as he had the day before, though. At any rate, when I came home from the meeting, he was wearing the T-shirt, jeans, and decrepit slippers again. But at least he was in the kitchen helping Mom fix dinner.

  * * *

  On Thursday afternoon, I came home loaded with schoolwork. My social studies teacher had assigned another project, I had a French test coming up, and both my math and science teachers had given us more homework than usual. Ordinarily, I would j
ust have done the best I could in whatever amount of time I had. But now I was determined to get straight A’s. (I’d need them for that college scholarship.) So I planned to shut myself up in my bedroom and study until bedtime, taking time out for dinner only.

  But Dad ruined my plans.

  After school, I found him once again parked in front of the TV, wasting electricity, this time wearing his bathrobe and pajamas. And the slippers, of course. A soap opera was on TV. Dad has always said soap operas are silly, but he seemed sort of interested in this one.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said wearily. “Where are Claire and Margo and Nicky?” (Mom was working that day. I knew Margo and Nicky had gotten home from school because their bikes were parked in the garage.)

  “Upstairs,” replied Dad vaguely.

  “Dad? Are you okay?” I asked. I had been angry with him on Tuesday. Today I was worried. Maybe he was sick. Maybe that was why he was in his bathrobe and pajamas.

  “I’m fine,” Dad answered, not taking his eyes off the television.

  “Are you sure?”

  Dad came to life. “I’m sure. I just wish everyone would quit asking how I am and leave me alone.”

  “Okay, okay, okay,” I said. I figured that Margo, Nicky, and Claire had asked him the same thing and been yelled at, too. Then it dawned on me. Claire. If Dad was still in his pajamas, and Mom was at work, how had Claire gotten home from kindergarten? Had Dad gone out in public in his pajamas? Had he let Claire walk home from school? She’d never done that before.

  “Claire? Claire?” I shouted. I bounded upstairs. I did not need this problem today. Not before my French test on a night when I had at least two nights’ worth of studying to do.

  “Yeah?” Claire replied.

  She and Margo and Nicky were in the living room, sitting in a row on the couch. They looked like they were in a doctor’s waiting room.

  “What’s going on, you guys?” I asked. Then, before I gave them a chance to answer, I said, “Claire, how did you get home from school today?”

  “Myriah’s mommy picked me up.”

  “Mrs. Perkins? Why did she pick you up?”

  “Because Daddy called her and asked her to.”

  I didn’t pursue the subject. It would have to wait until Mom came home. “So what are you guys doing here?”

  Margo and Nicky glanced at each other. “Daddy yelled at us,” said Margo.

  “Did he tell you to come up here and sit on the couch?” I wanted to know.

  Nicky shook his head. “Nope. We just felt like being together.”

  “And Daddy said, ‘Leave me alone!’” added Claire.

  Great, I thought. Dad wasn’t going to watch the kids. So I would have to. But how would I study? In the end, I encouraged Margo and Nicky to go to friends’ houses, and the triplets to play baseball in the backyard. Then I parted with some of my hard-earned baby-sitting money to pay Vanessa to watch Claire.

  When Mom came home late that afternoon, she was not happy to hear about any of this — particularly the part about Dad asking Mrs. Perkins to bring Claire home from kindergarten.

  She confronted Dad in the rec room, where he had become, I decided, an official couch potato. “This is —” she started to say loudly. Then she seemed to change her mind. She also lowered her voice. “I cannot,” she said, “work all day, come home, make dinner, clean up the house,” (I looked around and saw that the rec room had become a wreck room) “and help the children with their homework.”

  “Mom,” I said, feeling guilty, “I’m sorry about the house. I should have cleaned it up this afternoon, but I —”

  “It’s not your fault,” my mother interrupted me. “And it’s not your job, either. You have homework and baby-sitting.” She turned to Dad. “It’s your job,” she said flatly. “When I go to work and you stay at home, then you keep house, just like I do when I’m at home.”

  “Excuse me?” replied my father.

  A fight was coming on. I could tell. I glanced up at the stairs, saw my brothers and sisters huddled in the kitchen, watching, and led them to their rooms.

  We couldn’t overhear the fight — it wasn’t loud enough — but my mother must have won. By the following Tuesday, Dad had taken over Mom’s old role completely. He wasn’t much of a cook, but dinner was ready when I came home from the Friday and Monday BSC meetings. The house grew neater and cleaner — and so did Dad. He started getting dressed again.

  And on that Tuesday, when I returned from school, loaded with homework again, I found Dad and Claire together in the kitchen, working on a project together. Dad was up to his elbows in Elmer’s glue and macaroni.

  For some reason, that scene scared me more than the couch-potato scene had. That night, I called another meeting of the Pike Club.

  It took me awhile to realize why the sight of Dad and Claire had scared me. I should have been dibbly happy to see my father so cheerful. And wearing shoes. I should have been happy to find a neat house, clean bathrooms, and spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove. I should have been happy that Dad had picked up Claire from school himself and had thought of an afternoon art activity for her. But I wasn’t.

  Why? Because, I realized after almost twenty minutes of thinking when I should have been doing my homework, Dad looked like he was enjoying himself. What if he didn’t find another job? What if he didn’t care that he didn’t find another job?

  That was only one reason why I called the meeting of the Pike Club.

  The triplets, Vanessa, Nicky, Margo, Claire, and I gathered, once again, in my bedroom. Nobody else was as worried as I was. My brothers and sisters liked the club meetings, so they didn’t care why I had called one.

  “So,” I began, when we had all settled down, and Nicky had stopped pulling Margo’s hair, “how are you guys doing?”

  “I still want Skipper,” said Claire immediately.

  “I know you do,” I told her. “Skipper will have to wait, though.”

  “Yeah. Silly-billy-goo-goo.” (Claire is not known for being patient.)

  Nobody else said anything, but the triplets looked uncomfortable.

  “School going okay?” I asked.

  The boys looked, if possible, even more uncomfortable.

  “You know what’s happening to me in school?” I said.

  “What?” asked Byron with considerable interest.

  “These girls are teasing me about Dad. Nan White and Janet O’Neal started it. They’re awful anyway. But then Valerie and Rachel joined them. Nan passed around this note in the cafeteria — I found the note later, I think Nan wanted me to find it — and Janet and Valerie and Rachel were all laughing like crazy.”

  “Valerie?” spoke up Adam. “Wasn’t she the one who used to come home from school with you sometimes last year?”

  “Yup,” I replied. “And Rachel and I were science partners in fifth grade. We always had fun together.”

  “What did Nan’s note say?” asked Vanessa.

  “It said, ‘Mallory’s going to be on welfare,’” I replied. “First of all, that’s not true,” (I hope, I thought) “and secondly, if it were true, it’s not something to tease about. Besides, a lot of people go on welfare.”

  Claire opened her mouth then and I knew she was going to ask what welfare was, so I was relieved when Jordan started speaking before she could.

  “Michael Hofmeister won’t play ball with Byron and Adam and me anymore,” he said, looking at his brothers.

  “How come?” I asked, frowning.

  “We aren’t sure,” said Byron. “One day he was teasing us because we couldn’t bring in money to go on a field trip with our after-school baseball team, and the next day we asked him over and he said no and we’ve asked him two more times and he still says no.”

  “People can be pretty mean,” I said. (Byron looked like he wanted to cry.)

  “But some people are nice,” said Vanessa, which, fortunately, saved Byron from crying.

  “Oh, yeah?” I replied. “Who?”

/>   “Becca Ramsey. She gave me fifty cents yesterday when I wanted a Popsicle really, really badly.”

  “Well, that is nice,” I said, smiling.

  “Boy, I’d like to get Michael Hofmeister,” said Jordan.

  “Me, too,” said Adam. “I’d like to open his lunch one day and put crushed-up spiders in his peanut butter sandwich.”

  “Ew, gross!” squealed Margo.

  “I’d like to accidentally hit him in the head with a baseball,” said Jordan.

  “Jordan!” I cried.

  “I’d like to get his father fired from his job and then Michael would see how it feels,” exclaimed Byron. “And I’d laugh at him when he couldn’t go on a field trip.”

  “I,” said Vanessa to me, “wish you would write mean notes about Valerie and Rachel, but especially about Nan White and Janet O’Neal, and put the notes up all over school where everyone could read them.”

  “Okay, you guys. Enough,” I said gently. “We have other things to discuss.”

  “What other things?” asked Nicky.

  “Money,” I replied.

  “Money? Again? That’s all we ever talk about,” complained Margo. “We’ve been trying and trying to save money.”

  “I know. And you’ve been doing a great job,” I told her. “But now we need to figure out some ways to earn money.”

  “How come?” asked Claire.

  “Because Dad isn’t earning any money now, and Mom is earning some, but it isn’t even close to what Dad used to earn. I bet that maybe — maybe — it pays for food each week. And necessities.”

  “What are nessities?” Claire wanted to know.

  “Necessities, dumbbell,” Adam replied. “They’re things you really need, like soap and toothpaste and toilet paper.”

  “Toilet paper!” hooted Claire. (You just never know what will make her laugh.)

  “Anyway,” I went on, “so Mom’s probably paying for food and stuff, but we still have to pay the mortgage —” I glanced at Claire.

  She was looking at me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what a mortgage is, either. I can’t help it.”

  “That’s all right,” I told her. (I was betting that most of my brothers and sisters didn’t know what a mortgage is, any more than Claire did.) I tried to think how to explain that term. “See,” I began. “We don’t own our house ourselves yet. The bank owns part of it.”