Harriet the Spy (20 page)

“This is our clubhouse too,” shouted Sport. “You couldn’t even have BUILT it without me.”

“Precisely,” said Janie, “and I think the point is we should discuss exactly what this club is supposed to be for.”

There was a long silence. Some of them kicked the dirt with their feet. Others looked at the sky. Harriet suddenly noticed that Rachel was giving Janie a long hateful look. Finally Rachel said, “It may be your
CLUB
but it’s my
BACKYARD
.”

The remark fell heavily into the group. What now? thought Harriet with excitement.

“That,” said Janie finally, “settles that.” She turned and walked toward the back door.

“You bet your nose it does,” said Sport and followed Janie. They slammed the back door, producing a distant shriek from Mrs. Hennessey.

“I agree with them,” said Beth Ellen and stomped out. What in the world has happened to Beth Ellen? thought Harriet. She’s not a mouse anymore. Harriet watched with glee as one by one the other children left. Marion and Rachel finally sat alone. They looked at each other and then looked away.

“I guess,” said Rachel with some embarrassment, “that I’ll go see if the cake is ready.” She was getting up rather forlornly when suddenly Laura and Carrie came back.

“We decided that there wasn’t anything else to do anyway, so we might as well play bridge,” said Laura.

“Besides,” said Carrie, “I’m rather fond of it.”

Harriet watched while they set up a dinky little card table, put out some chipped cups, and cut the cake. When they dealt the cards, she left. As she went over the fence she thought to herself, I’m glad my life is different. I bet they’ll be doing that the rest of their lives—and she felt rather sorry for them for a moment. But only for a moment. As she walked along the street she thought, I have a nice life. With or without Ole Golly, I have a nice life.

The time is ripe, Harriet thought as she went into the senior editor’s office. She had a long private conversation with the senior editor, who was called Lisa Quackenbush. She was a tallish girl who spit a lot when she talked and who seemed to find Harriet as funny as a TV comedian. Harriet couldn’t see anything funny whatever in what she was relating to Miss Quackenbush and so made some rapid notes after leaving the office.

MISS QUACKENBUSH IS EITHER INSANE OR SHE HAS A VERY NERVOUS LAUGH.

The week after the conference there appeared on the Sixth Grade Page the following announcement. It was placed quite prominently in the center of the page with a border around it.

THIS PAGE WISHES TO RETRACT CERTAIN STATEMENTS PRINTED IN A CERTAIN NOTEBOOK BY THE EDITOR OF THE
S
IXTH
G
RADE
P
AGE
WHICH WERE UNFAIR STATEMENTS AND BESIDES WERE LIES. ANYONE WHO SAW THESE STATEMENTS IS HEREBY NOTIFIED THAT THEY WERE LIES AND THAT A GENERAL APOLOGY IS OFFERED BY THE EDITOR OF THE
S
IXTH
G
RADE
P
AGE
.

The day the announcement appeared Harriet stayed home from sheer embarrassment. She managed to convince her mother that she was just about to come down with a terrible cold, the type of cold that could be nipped in the bud by only one little day home from school. There is, of course, no kind of a cold in the world like this, but Harriet’s mother had become convinced of this because it had happened to work so many times. Harriet knew just what signs of listlessness it took to put her mother’s mind into this track. She languished, therefore, until she heard her mother leave to go shopping. The moment the door shut Harriet leaped from the bed as though shot from a cannon.

She worked all day on her story, that is from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon. Then she got up, stretched, and feeling very virtuous, she took a walk by the river. There was a cold wind off the water, but the day was one of those bright, brilliant, shining days that made her feel the world was beautiful, would always be, would always sing, could hold no disappointments.

She skipped along the bank, stopping once to watch a tugboat, following an old woman once all the way to the mayor’s house. She took a few notes, concentrating on description which she felt to be her weakest point.

YESTERDAY WHEN I WENT INTO THAT HARDWARE STORE IT SMELLED LIKE THE INSIDE OF AN OLD THERMOS BOTTLE.

I HAVE THOUGHT A LOT ABOUT BEING THINGS SINCE TRYING TO BE AN ONION. I HAVE TRIED TO BE A BENCH IN THE PARK, AN OLD SWEATER, A CAT, AND MY MUG IN THE BATHROOM. I THINK I DID THE MUG BEST BECAUSE WHEN I WAS LOOKING AT IT I FELT IT LOOKING BACK AT ME AND I FELT LIKE WE WERE TWO MUGS LOOKING AT EACH OTHER. I WONDER IF GRASS TALKS.

She sat there thinking, feeling very calm, happy, and immensely pleased with her own mind. She looked up and down the walk. No one was in sight.

She looked out over the water to the neon sign whose pink greed spoiled the view at night. When she looked back she saw them coming toward her. They were moving so slowly they hardly seemed to be in motion. Sport had his hands in his pockets and looked out over the water. Janie walked with her eyes as nearly skyward as possible. If there had been anything in front of her she would have broken her neck. They didn’t appear to be talking, but they were so far away Harriet couldn’t really tell.

They were so far away that they looked like dolls. They made her think of the way she imagined the people when she played Town. Somehow this way she could see them better than she ever had before. She looked at them each carefully in the longish time it took them to reach her. She made herself walk in Sport’s shoes, feeling the holes in his socks rub against his ankles. She pretended she had an itchy nose when Janie put one abstracted hand up to scratch. She felt what it would feel like to have freckles and yellow hair like Janie, then funny ears and skinny shoulders like Sport.

When they reached her they just stood there in front of her, each looking in a different direction. The wind was terribly cold. Harriet looked at their feet. They looked at her feet. Then they looked at their own feet.

Well, thought Harriet. She opened her notebook very carefully, watching their eyes as she did. They watched her back. She wrote:

OLE GOLLY IS RIGHT, SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO LIE.

She looked up at Sport and Janie. They didn’t look angry. They were just waiting for her to finish. She continued:

NOW THAT THINGS ARE BACK TO NORMAL I CAN GET SOME REAL WORK DONE.

She slammed the book and stood up. All three of them turned then and walked along the river.

“I won’t go,” Harriet told her parents. She glared at them.

Her parents had called her down from her room while she was busy on a project. Ordinarily the cook served Harriet her dinner at six in the kitchen while her parents had martinis in the living room. Harriet looked at her watch. It was exactly six. So not only had they interrupted her project, but now they were making her late for her dinner, which was very likely getting cold.

She had been making a time line of her life. By taping sheets of paper carefully together, she had created a strip so long it reached from the door of her bedroom to the bottom of the old toy box that held all her notebooks. It had taken her twelve pieces of paper. Since Harriet would be twelve on her next birthday, she had designated one sheet for each year of her life. Then she had begun to fill in the important events. But she had barely finished half of the first page when her mother interrupted her.

SIX MONTHS. SPEAKS FIRST WORD
, Harriet had just written halfway across the first-year page. She thought for a moment about what her first word might have been. She pictured herself at six months old, with her nursemaid poised over the bassinet looking down at her, probably holding a warm milk-filled bottle. What might she have said?

FIRST WORD
, she wrote as a subcategory. She thought about it for a while, trying to decide what a first word might be, at least a first word from the lips of a highly intelligent New York infant named Harriet M. Welsch. Carefully she printed PROCEED.

Then she went on to
SEVEN MONTHS. SPEAKS FIRST SENTENCE. FIRST SENTENCE: PROCEED WITH THE FEEDING, PLEASE.

“Harriet, dear?” her mother had called up the stairs to Harriet’s cozy bedroom at the top of the tall, narrow house. “Would you come down, please?”

Reluctantly Harriet had rolled up her time line and headed down the two long flights of stairs to the double living room on the first floor. “I hope we didn’t interrupt anything important, dear,” Mrs. Welsch said after Harriet entered the living room and sat down on a dark red velvet chair. Harriet shrugged. They would not understand the time line. It would make them feel nervous and uncertain, she thought. Her parents frequently felt nervous and uncertain about her projects.

So she said only, “I was just thinking about my infancy. Do you happen to remember my first word?”

“Of course I do! Parents never forget such things,” Mrs. Welsch said. She turned to her husband. “Harry, tell Harriet what her first word was!”

Harriet’s father stared blankly at her.

Mrs. Welsch gave a thin laugh. “It was
cookie
, dear. You were about fourteen months old, and one day you quite clearly said
cookie
.”

“And my first sentence?” Harriet asked, glumly realizing that she would have to start her time line over with the correct information. Cross-outs were unacceptable and Harriet only used pens. Just last Christmas her parents had given her a wonderful dark green Waterman pen, which she treasured and used as often as possible. “What was my first sentence?”

“Well, you combined a verb and a noun, dear. You said, ‘Gimme cookie.’”

“Oh,” Harriet said. Well, she thought, I won’t bother to erase after all. It’s essentially the same thing as “Proceed with the feeding.”

“Why did you want me to come down?” she asked her parents.

“We have some news to share with you. Would you like a peanut, by the way?” Mrs. Welsch put her martini down and passed a small silver dish of peanuts to Harriet.

Harriet shook her head. Ordinarily she liked peanuts, but for some reason she could feel her appetite disappearing. It made her uncomfortable when her parents announced news. Their news never seemed to be the kind of news Harriet wanted to hear. “What news?” she asked.

“Your father has received a rather important assignment from the network. Harry, wouldn’t you like to describe it to Harriet?”

Mr. Welsch had been looking at the folded newspaper on the table near the peanut dish. He was pretending not to. But Harriet could see him surreptitiously glancing at the day’s headlines. “Paris,” he said.

“Paris?” asked Harriet with suspicion. “France?”

“We’re to leave next week for Paris!” Mrs. Welsch explained in the same perky, delighted voice that she used to describe bridge tournaments or antiques auctions.

“For how long?” Harriet wasn’t deceived by the voice. A little vacation in Paris would be okay, she thought. Maybe it would be a pleasant interlude before school resumed next month. But she had an ominous feeling. She was glad she hadn’t accepted a peanut. It might have lulled her too quickly into a cheerful reaction, when really
suspicion
was called for.

Her mother wiped her lips tidily, using a small cocktail napkin printed with a red-and-green design of olives in a stack. She said something that sounded like
twamah
while holding the napkin in front of her mouth.

“
Twamah?”
Harriet repeated, wondering if perhaps her mother was speaking French, although Harriet had studied French for two years already, in fifth and sixth grades, and
twamah
had not been a vocabulary word.

“
Trois mois
,” Mr. Welsch said quite clearly and with an air of impatience. “We’re going to live in Paris for three months, beginning next week.”

“The network has rented a lovely apartment for us, dear,” Mrs. Welsch said. “Quite near the Luxembourg Gardens.
Les jardins
, I mean.”

In her mind Harriet leapt ahead on her time line to the final sheet, the one for her twelfth year, the one that she wedged under a corner of her old toy box when the long strip was unrolled on the floor of her room. AGE ALMOST-TWELVE: MOVES TO PARIS. It was not what she had had in mind for age almost-twelve.

“I won’t go,” she told her parents, glaring. Then she added, “And in case you missed it, I expostulated that.”

Her father looked at her through his glasses. Harriet’s father was a television executive. He had an executive face, and hair that was combed in an executive way.

“Excuse me?” Mr. Welsch said.

Harriet imagined how he must look in his office when some poor scriptwriter, nervous and hungry, sat before him with a manuscript held together by a frayed rubber band and pleaded for a chance to be head writer on a sitcom so he could pay his debts and feed his starving children. Her father would probably look down through his glasses the same way. He would probably say in that same executive voice, “Excuse me?”

Harriet sighed. She repeated it. “I won’t go,” she said for the second time.

“No, no, I understood that part,” her father said. He sipped his martini. “I didn’t understand what you added, about expostulating.”

“Oh. Well,” Harriet explained, “Mr. Grenville says—”

Harriet’s mother interrupted. “Mr. Grenville is one of Harriet’s teachers at school, dear,” she told Harriet’s father.

He nodded. Harriet could tell he was making a note of that in his head. “Go on,” he said.

“Mr. Grenville says we must use strong verbs when we write.”

“Strong verbs?” Mr. Welsch took another sip of his drink.

“Yes. For example, instead of just saying ‘He walked,’ we should say ‘He ambled.’ Or ‘He strolled.’”

“I see.”

“And instead of ‘She said,’ it would be better to use a strong verb.”

“Like
expostulate
, perhaps?” Harriet’s father asked.

“Exactly.
Expostulate
is my current favorite. I have a list of favorite strong verbs in my notebook.”

“And so when you told us that you wouldn’t go, you wanted to be certain that we understood you weren’t simply
saying
it. You were—”

“Expostulating,” Harriet said.

“I see.”

“She’s very clever, dear, isn’t she?” Mrs. Welsch said to her husband. She looked proudly at Harriet, who was sitting stiffly on the dark red velvet chair still glaring at both of her parents. Then she held the small dish of peanuts toward Harriet again, but Harriet once more declined. She was hoping that her failure to take a peanut—combined with the expostulating—would indicate to them how outraged she was.

“It is outrageous,” she said. “The whole idea is outrageous.” Harriet liked the sound of that. Probably, she decided, she would add
outrageous
to the list of strong adjectives she was also keeping in her notebook. “And I absolutely will not go.”

“Harriet,” said her father, and now he finished the last drops of his martini, set the glass down, and reached for the newspaper, “we were not planning to take you.”

As she had feared, her dinner was cold. Cook had not even had the courtesy to keep it warm in the oven for her. Harriet sat down at the round wooden table in the kitchen, unfolded her napkin, and frowned at her plate. Chicken. Chicken was okay cold. Salad. That was
supposed
to be cold, so Harriet couldn’t complain about the salad, though she turned the lettuce leaves over carefully with her fork to make certain there were no lurking onions. Cook knew that Harriet loathed raw onions but sometimes she sneaked them in anyway. Not tonight. No onions, Harriet noted with relief.

But there were mashed potatoes on the plate. Few things in the world were worse than cold mashed potatoes. They tainted the other food, Harriet decided after a moment. So she stood up, carried her plate to the sink, and noisily scraped the potatoes into the garbage. Cook watched her.

“Wouldn’t be cold if you’d come on time,” Cook said pointedly.

Harriet sat back down at the table and stabbed a bit of chicken with her fork. She vaguely wanted to say something disagreeable and sharp-tongued to Cook. It was their usual mode of communication, although they were surprisingly fond of each other. But no words came to her. She poked at the chicken again and realized to her horror that she was starting to cry.

Crying! And she would be twelve years old in October!

Cook hadn’t noticed yet. “You’re pretty quiet tonight for someone whose mouth usually goes yammer yammer yammer,” she said, leaning over the stove to stir whatever she was preparing for Harriet’s parents’ dinner.

Harriet gave an enormous sniff and tried very hard to make it sound like a sarcastic one, but it didn’t. It was quite wet, actually more a snuffle than a sniff, and she had to grab her napkin and hold it to her face.

“I got a bad feeling,” Cook said, “it’s not mashed potatoes making you that miserable.”

“No,” Harriet wailed. “They’re going to Paris and they’re not taking me!” Even as she wailed it, Harriet remembered that she didn’t
want
to live in Paris. She wanted to live right here in New York, in this tall, skinny house on East Eighty-seventh Street where she had lived all her life, nearly twelve years so far.

“Oh, that,” said Cook.

Harriet finished one final sniff, wiped her nose on her napkin, and looked at Cook suspiciously, “What do you mean ‘Oh, that’? Did you know already?”

Cook nodded, “Yeah, they’re paying me to stay on and cook. Wanted to pay me
less
because there won’t be so much cooking with them gone. But then they found out that those people across the street…” She gestured toward the small window that looked out onto the sidewalk. Because the kitchen was in the basement, Harriet and Cook could watch people’s feet through the window, and they often did. Feet were interesting, Harriet thought. She had been thinking about adding foot and shoe observations to her notes on her spy route.

Now Harriet looked through the window because Cook was pointing in that direction. She saw a pair of high-heeled brown leather boots walk past, followed by a small fuzzy dog on a leash. Suddenly the dog stopped, sniffed the small wrought-iron fence that enclosed the kitchen window, and raised his leg alongside it. Harriet looked away to give the dog the privacy she felt he deserved.

Cook wasn’t referring to the passing pedestrians, anyway. She meant, Harriet knew, the people who lived directly across the street in a brownstone house almost identical to the Welsches’. Their name was Feigenbaum. Dr. Feigenbaum was a psychiatrist and had an office on the first floor of their house. His wife, who had an office upstairs, was a doctor who specialized in women, which Harriet thought was a very limited specialty; Harriet preferred unisex everything, especially clothes. Somewhere in the midst of all those offices the two Dr. Feigenbaums also lived. Harriet, who had been a spy since she was eight, had been spying on the Feigenbaums for several years. She felt that they had some deeply hidden secrets and a life lacking in emotional depth.

They also were lacking in competent domestic help, Harriet knew, and frequently tried to hire Cook away from the Welsches.

“They tried again?” Harriet asked.

“Yeah, offered me full time, full pay. Seemed like a good time to make the move, with your parents away and all. You going to eat that or not?” Cook began to pick up Harriet’s plate. Harriet looked at her uneaten chicken, suddenly decided she was hungry after all, and snatched the plate back. “I’m eating it,” she said. “Don’t get grabby.”