Ramona and Her Mother (4 page)

Ramona did not understand. Everyone laughed when the man on television said the devil made him do something. Why wasn't the remark funny when she said it? Because she was seven and a half (right now!). That was why. Grown-ups could get away with anything. It wasn't fair.

“Get a spoon and a jar from the kitchen,” directed Mrs. Quimby, “and scoop up the toothpaste.” Then she said to Beezus, “She can use it herself, and the rest of us can use a fresh tube.”

Somehow Ramona felt sad knowing she was to be excluded from the family tube of toothpaste for a long time. And she wished her mother would not speak about her to Beezus as if she were not in the room.

“Ramona,” said her mother, “don't you ever let me catch you squeezing out a whole tube of toothpaste again.”

“I won't,” promised Ramona, and as she went off to the kitchen for a jar and a spoon she felt unexpectedly cheerful. She had done something she had always wanted to do.
Of course
she would never squeeze out a whole tube of toothpaste again. She had done it once. She did not need to do it again.

I
n February there came a day for Ramona when everything went wrong, one thing after another, like a row of dominoes falling over. Ramona's mother set it off. “By the way, Ramona,” said Mrs. Quimby after breakfast as she hastily tossed potatoes, carrots, and stew meat into the Crock-Pot to simmer while the family was away all day. “Please don't run in the hall in your socks. You might slip and fall.”

Ramona's father was next. “And Ramona,” he said, pulling strings off celery before slicing it and adding it to the stew, “when you wash your hands, don't leave the dirt on the cake of soap.”

Then Beezus. “Or wipe it on the towel.”

“I haven't had time to get dirty,” said Ramona, who had finished her breakfast. “And I have my shoes on.”

“We are talking about yesterday,” said her father.

Ramona thought yesterday was a long time ago, hardly worth mentioning. “Everybody picks on me,” she said.

“Poor kid.” Mr. Quimby kissed his wife on the cheek and each daughter on the top of her head. Then he said, singing the first few words, “Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work I go and at least forty-six changes in produce prices to remember.”

Ramona knew her father dreaded Wednesdays, the day prices were changed on fruits and vegetables.

“Maybe things will be easier when you are more used to the job,” said Mrs. Quimby. After her husband left to catch the bus, she kissed the girls as if she were thinking about something else and handed Ramona her lunch box and Beezus the brown paper bag that held her sandwich. Seventh graders thought lunch boxes were babyish. “Scoot along,” Mrs. Quimby said. “I have to leave early to take the car for a brake adjustment, and then I have to take the bus to work.”

“I wish Daddy would get used to his job,” remarked Beezus as the sisters plodded toward Glenwood School. Clouds hung low, and the wind was cold. For days the sidewalks had been too wet for roller skating.

“Me, too,” said Ramona, who wanted her parents to be happy so their children could be happy, too. “Why doesn't he find another job?”

“Jobs aren't that easy to get,” Beezus explained. “Remember how long he was out of work before he found a job at the market.”

Ramona did remember. She remembered how discouraged her father had been after a day of job-hunting and how he had disliked standing in line to collect unemployment insurance.

“It might be easier if he had finished college,” said Beezus.

“Why didn't he?” asked Ramona.

“Because he and Mother got married,” Beezus explained. “And then they had me.” Beezus sounded smug, as if being the first born made her more important to her parents than Ramona.

But I'm the baby, thought Ramona. She was glad when school started; maybe her day would improve in school. Ramona liked Mrs. Rudge, her new teacher, who had taken over the second grade when the former teacher left after Christmas to have a baby. She
thought
Mrs. Rudge liked her, as she liked all the children, but she was not sure exactly where she stood with her. The classroom buzzed softly and busily with the sound of children learning about Indians and cursive writing.

When the morning was half over, Ramona finished her work sheet and was busy filling all the double
oo
's she could find with crossed eyes and frowns:

Mrs. Rudge paused beside her desk. Ramona did not have time to hide the frowning
oo
's.

Mrs. Rudge glanced over Ramona's work sheet. “Why don't you look again?” she suggested. “Is
like
spelled
l-i-c-k
?”

“I can't spell,” said Ramona. “I'm terrible at spelling.” That's what her family said whenever Ramona wrote a note. They always laughed and said, “Ramona is no speller. See how she spells
much m-u-c-k
.” They behaved as if she had done something clever.

Ramona learned right there that Mrs. Rudge was a teacher who did not accept excuses. “There is no such a word as
can't
,” she said, and went on to inspect Becky's work sheet.

How can there be no such word as
can't
? Ramona wondered. Mrs. Rudge had just said
can't
. If there was no such word as
can't
, Mrs. Rudge could not have said there was no such word as
can't
. Therefore, what Mrs. Rudge had said could not be true. Ramona was left with a vague feeling that Mrs. Rudge did not like her because she did not offer to give Ramona extra help in spelling.

At lunchtime when Ramona went into the multipurpose room with her lunch box, she found that she had a leftover-pot-roast sandwich in her lunch. She did not like a leftover-pot-roast sandwich because the meat slid out in big pieces when she bit into it. After chewing awhile she thought, I won't eat it, and she stuffed the rest of her sandwich into the hole in her milk carton and threw it into the trash can. She sat there arguing with herself about how there had to be a word
can't
because she had just thought it. This was not a good day.

After school at the Kemps' house, Ramona and Howie drank the same old apple juice and ate the same old graham crackers that Mrs. Kemp always set out for them. Sticky Willa Jean, holding Woger by one paw, stood and watched. She was wearing a T-shirt with
Grandma Loves Me
printed on the front. The shirt had shrunk so much it showed her navel—tummy button, Mrs. Kemp called it.

Then Howie got out the checkerboard, which he placed on the carpet. Kneeling, he and Ramona began to divide the red and black checkers.

“I want to play.” Willa Jean plunked herself down on the carpet, sitting on Woger as if he were a cushion, which was no way to treat a bear, especially a bear like Woger.

“Aw, Willa Jean—” protested Howie, who had his problems with his little sister.

“Now Howie,” said Mrs. Kemp, busy with her endless knitting, “play nicely with your sister. She's little, you know.”

Howie knew all right.

Willa Jean, pleased to have her grandmother on her side, set a red checker on top of a black checker. “Your turn,” she said to Ramona as if she were being generous.

Ramona and Howie shared one hopeless look. They were familiar with Willa Jean's original rules for checkers. Ramona set a black checker on top of Willa Jean's red checker. Howie added red and so on in turn until the tower of checkers grew high and crooked. At last, when Willa Jean set a checker on top, the tower tumbled.

“I won!” crowed Willa Jean as Howie tried to prevent scattered checkers from rolling under the couch. “Grandma, I beat Howie and Wamona!”

“Smart girl!” Mrs. Kemp paused in her knitting to smile down upon her granddaughter.

The situation was hopeless. “Let's go down in the basement and see if we can think of something to build,” said Howie, and Ramona agreed. They would be undisturbed in the basement. Willa Jean was afraid of the furnace.

Safe from interruption, Howie and Ramona decided to build a boat of the scrap lumber Mr. Kemp collected for Howie to work with. They had already built a dog, a cat, and a duck decoy that Mr. Kemp said would never fool a real live duck. Now they sawed and pounded until they had a boat with two decks. They were so good at nailing by now they did not even pound their fingers. Next they found a dowel and sawed off two pieces for smokestacks, which Howie studied. “It's going to be hard to nail them to our boat,” he said.

“We could use Scotch tape,” said Ramona, who felt that almost anything could be accomplished with Scotch tape.

“I don't think it's strong enough for wood,” was Howie's objection. “Glue might be better.”

“Scotch tape would work if we use lots of it.” Ramona was an experienced user of Scotch tape.

In the end, glue won out because Howie thought a boat should look neat. Very, very carefully they spread glue on the ends of the dowels and pressed them in place. They put the top back on the tube of glue, and each held a dowel in place, waiting for the glue to dry. They had not spilled a drop. Fortunately, the glue was quick drying.

“Let's see if our boat will float,” said Howie. He pressed the plug of the laundry tub in place and turned on the faucet.

“Howie, what are you two doing down there?” Mrs. Kemp called from the top of the stairs.

“Just seeing if our boat will float,” he answered.

“All right,” said Mrs. Kemp. “Just don't let the tub overflow.”

“We won't,” promised Howie.

The boat floated. Howie and Ramona stirred up a storm at sea to make things interesting and watched their boat ride the waves. As it bobbed up and down, Ramona happened to glance up at a shelf above the laundry tub. There she spotted a blue plastic bottle with the picture of a nice old-fashioned lady's face on the label. Bluing!

Ramona knew all about bluing because her mother had used it to make white washing look whiter back in the days before she had gone to work. “If we could get that bottle, we could turn the water blue like a real ocean,” she suggested. “It only takes a little bit.”

Howie was enthusiastic, but how were they to reach a bottle on such a high shelf? For some reason, Mrs. Rudge's words, there's no such word as
can't
, ran through Ramona's mind. Of course they could get that bottle of bluing.

Ramona managed to balance on her stomach on the edge of the tub. Then she got one knee up and with a boost from Howie was able to climb up onto the edge of the tub. She stood teetering on the narrow edge clinging to the front of the shelf with one hand while she managed to grasp the bottle with the other and hand it down to Howie. As she did so, the top flew off. Bluing splashed over Howie, who tried to catch the top only to have the bottle slip from his fingers into the tub of water, where it poured forth swirls of beautiful deep blue. Ramona was so startled she lost her balance and landed standing up to her knees in blue water.

“Boy, Ramona, see what you've done.” Howie looked down at his shirt and jeans, now streaked with blue.