The Penderwicks in Spring

by Jeanne Birdsall

  “That’s just more for me to remember.”

  He went on, pleased to have an excuse to speak Latin. “And nimbus means ‘rainstorm,’ so those are the rainclouds. And then there are the stratus—”

  “Stop, you’re making it worse!” She covered her ears.

  “You win,” he said, laughing. “All Penderwicks home and accounted for?”

  “Except for Rosalind, of course.”

  “And how long until Rosalind comes home from college?”

  Batty had been keeping a running total since Rosalind’s last visit in February. Her college wasn’t that far away, in Rhode Island, and she came home for holidays and breaks. But that wasn’t often enough for anyone, especially Batty.

  “She’ll be home in three weeks and two days. Twenty-three days.” It was easy to remember—Rosalind would get home on the day just before Batty’s eleventh birthday.

  “Getting closer, thank goodness.” He picked up his cooler. “I’m ready to mingle with the hordes. How about you?”

  “Ready,” she said, and they went into the house.

  BEN PROUDLY MANAGED HIS OWN BATH TIME, from running the water all the way through the final rinse. It was a new-won responsibility, and one that he treasured. His friend Rafael, not yet trusted with filling bathtubs (there had once been a flood), envied Ben greatly and repeatedly begged his mother to follow the Penderwick parents’ example.

  Now that Ben was old enough to bathe alone, he considered himself old enough to expect privacy while he did so. Most particularly from Lydia, who wasn’t supposed to roam free through the house but could give almost anyone the slip. Their father made a joke of it, calling Lydia the Great Getaway Artist and saying that she should go into bank robbery when she grew up. Ben didn’t think it was funny, especially when he was in a bathroom with no lock on the door.

  He compensated by setting up an early-warning system, a hanger leaning against the door. This was most important for those bath times when he had something to hide not just from Lydia but from anyone who thought he shouldn’t take rocks into the bathtub with him, which was just about everybody in the family.

  This evening, with his early-warning system in place and his filthy clothes off and stuffed into the hamper, he stepped into the tub, carefully clutching the one rock he’d found that had extra-exciting possibilities. Whitish gray with darker gray speckles, it was shaped like a big egg. Ben cleaned it with the special toothbrush he kept just for rocks, then rinsed it off under the spigot, turning it round and round. Maybe, he thought, just maybe it had once been an actual egg. Rafael talked about fossilized dinosaur eggs that had been discovered in Mongolia, but that didn’t mean some couldn’t be found in Massachusetts, too. Because Massachusetts had been roamed by dinosaurs, too, right?

  Ben wrapped the rock in a washcloth and set it gently on the bathtub ledge. He’d be the luckiest boy ever if it turned out to be a dinosaur egg. He’d be on television, and scientists from around the world would visit and ask if he would let them touch it. Or he could sell it to a museum for a whole lot of money, like a billion dollars. With a billion dollars, he could buy his parents a car to replace the dead one.

  A small noise caught his attention—someone was slowly and stealthily turning the doorknob. Lydia! With a great splash, Ben leapt out of the tub just as his warning hanger tipped over. He shoved the door shut again and leaned on it with all his might.

  “You can’t come in!”

  “Yes, inside!”

  “No, never, go away.”

  This time Lydia didn’t reply, but Ben stayed by the door, suspecting she wouldn’t give up so easily. He was right. A moment later, the sound of huffing and puffing came rising up from the vicinity of his feet. He crouched down and looked under the door. One bright and hopeful eye gazed back at him.

  “Lydia loves Ben.”

  He grabbed his towel and stuffed it against the crack under the door, blocking out that eye.

  “Ben, Ben,” cried Lydia in heartbreaking tones.

  He took the rest of the towels from the racks and piled them on top of the first towel and was about to shove the hamper on top of all that when he heard extra footsteps and scuffling.

  “She’s bothering me again!” he shouted to whichever Penderwick was out there.

  “It’s okay. I’ve got her,” Jane answered from the other side of the door. Then came the sounds of Lydia being unwillingly borne away.

  Relieved, and cold from all that standing around, Ben went back to his bath, and to spending the money he’d get from his dinosaur egg. Two cars for his parents would be even better, and after that, there should be enough money left to buy a movie studio, because he and Rafael wanted to make science-fiction movies. And when Batty was finally ready for a new dog—which Ben hoped would be soon—Ben would get a dog, no, a hundred dogs, because only a hundred could start to make up for Hound, the greatest dog who had ever lived. And he and Rafael would train the hundred dogs to work on movie sets, in case they needed alien dogs in their science-fiction movies.

  When Ben was as clean as he was likely to get, he slipped out of the bathroom with the egg rock wrapped in a towel, successfully navigating the route to his bedroom without getting caught by any sisters. Unfortunately, his bedroom door didn’t have a lock, either. His parents had promised he could get one when he turned twelve, but that was four years away and he was hoping that Lydia would have glommed on to someone else long before then. In the meantime, he was reduced to using an early-warning system here, too. After clearing a space for his egg rock on the bottom bunk, which was so full of interesting things that Ben always slept on the top bunk, he was about to put the hanger in place.

  Someone was already turning the doorknob.

  “Go away!” he shouted, throwing the hanger and himself against the door. “You’re driving me insane!”

  “It’s Mom.”

  “Sorry.” Ben let his mother into the room. “I thought you were Lydia. She tried to bust in on my bath again.”

  “I heard about that, but you’re okay for the rest of the evening. She’s just gone to sleep.”

  “She could wake up and try to escape. Maybe you should tie her to the crib.” He’d suggested this many times, but no one would take him up on the idea.

  “That would be dangerous, as well as impolite. I never tied you to anything, did I?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Take my word for it. I didn’t.”

  Ben knew why his mother was there. She’d come to say good night because she was going back to her office at the university and wouldn’t be home again until after he was asleep. Ben was proud of his mother for being an astrophysicist—Rafael’s mother was a psychologist, and neither boy thought brains anywhere near as fascinating as stars—but he didn’t like it when she went out to work at night. And he didn’t like it when his father did, either. So he’d developed a strategy to keep people at home—keep them talking as long as he could. Though it hadn’t yet worked, Ben never stopped trying.

  “Mom, I found this today.” He showed her the rock. “Do you think it’s a dinosaur egg turned into a fossil?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Are you sure? Because it would be worth a lot of money.”

  “I’m sure, honey.”

  This was a setback. But Ben was too attached to this rock to give up right away. “Maybe it’s an outer-space rock, worn into this funny shape by its passage through the earth’s atmosphere. That would be worth lots of money, too.”

  “Not that, either. Although it’s a very nice rock, it’s just a rock.”

  “You’re absolutely positive, right? Because Rafael says there are lots of space rocks around that nobody knows about. We’re going to make a movie about it someday called Secret Rock Invasion. He’s going to be the scientist and I’m going to be the alien in charge of sneaking the rocks to Earth.”

  One of the extra-good things about his mother was that she liked science fiction. Ben knew this and milked it
as long as he could, all the way to the Delta Quadrant and rocks that formed whenever an extraterrestrial burped. But since she was still a grown-up, she kissed him good night and left for work long before he was ready to let her go.

  “Plus, no dinosaur egg,” he said, plopping himself down on the edge of the bottom bunk. “And no billion dollars.”

  Batty’s piano lessons were always good, but that evening’s was a great one. Her teacher, Mr. Trice, demonstrated how the Bach would sound if played by Scott Joplin, which led to Batty playing a Scott Joplin piece as if she were Bach. Which led to much hilarity—Mr. Trice was like that. He insisted that music had to be fun, or why bother?

  Batty had never before tried to think like Bach—or like Scott Joplin—and was eager to do more of it when she got back home. But when she arrived, she found the way to her piano blocked by teenagers. This was happening more and more often, and she sometimes wished the piano could be moved out of the living room and up to her own room, where no teenagers ever went. Tonight the teenagers were: Jane, Artie, whom Jane had known since elementary school, and a boy named Donovan, a more recent addition. Jane actually had two friends named Donovan, both stocky soccer players with dark hair and glasses. At first Batty had thought they were brothers, with Donovan as their last name. But they were each Donovan Something Else—Batty never could remember what—and it didn’t matter anyway. Whichever Donovan was there, Batty was too shy to play Bach or Joplin in front of him. Or Artie, either, though she was more used to him.

  She went upstairs and knocked on Ben’s door, using their private signal—three quick knocks and a slap—and waited while he removed his hanger warning system and opened the door.

  “Did you bring me anything from Keiko?” he asked.

  She held up a paper bag full of cookies. Keiko, who was Mr. Trice’s daughter and also Batty’s best friend, liked baking with her own made-up recipes. Since sometimes disaster ensued, she used Ben to test her odder concoctions before they were let out into the wider world.

  “I’m not supposed to say what’s in them until you try one.”

  “But no sweet potatoes?” He’d gotten sick just once from Keiko’s cooking, when he’d eaten three slices of her sweet potato meringue pie.

  “No sweet potatoes.”

  Ben took a cookie. It turned out to be almost normal, chocolate with small chunks of lemon rind.

  “It’s good,” Ben mumbled through a mouthful.

  Now that he hadn’t frothed at the mouth or fallen over dead, Batty took one for herself.

  “The living room is full of teenagers again,” she said, “and I want to play the piano. Will you watch with me to see if they leave?”

  Ben didn’t care about the teenagers in the living room, but he’d follow that bag of cookies anywhere. They settled at the top of the steps, where they could spy down on the front hall from behind the baby gate. Batty didn’t blame Jane for having boys visit. It must be nice when you’re sixteen, especially for Jane, who was always doing research for the books she planned to write. And Keiko thought Batty should be grateful to have all those boys available for observation—any information she could gather would prepare them both for the fraught teen years, which were coming whether they liked it or not. Maybe so, thought Batty, but it would be easier to be grateful if the boys didn’t so often keep her from the piano.

  “I thought one of my rocks was a dinosaur egg.” Ben spoke quietly. Lydia’s room was right there, and the last thing he wanted was to wake her up. “But Mom said no. I would have sold it and we would have been rich.”

  “We don’t need to be rich.”

  “I know, but still.”

  Batty knew what he meant. At dinner, Skye had said she’d take on more math tutoring—she already had three students—and Jane had offered to start sewing the family’s clothes to save money. Although Mr. Penderwick and Iantha had told them to stop, stop, stop, none of that was necessary and everyone should leave the money issues to the adults, Batty knew her sisters wouldn’t stop. And Rosalind had a job at college, working in the library. Someday, when Batty was a teenager, she’d want to make money, too. She had come up with a name for a future neighborhood odd-jobs business, Penderwick Willing to Work, or PWTW. But the “Work” part of it was still a mystery, and it would have to be something a shy person could do. Keiko thought that Batty would outgrow her shyness by her teen years, but Batty wasn’t so sure.

  “Ben, go down and see what those boys are doing,” she said.

  “Can I have the last cookie?”

  “When you come back.”

  She watched him labor through the baby gates, down and up again. When he returned, he said, “The Donovans are lying on the floor, and Artie’s doing handstands. I wish I could do a handstand. Also, they’re eating pretzels again. We never have any pretzels left anymore.”

  So now both Donovans were in the living room. When had the other one gotten into the house? Instead of going away, the boys were multiplying. Batty couldn’t help thinking they didn’t spread themselves around very well. Surely there were teenage girls right this minute without any boys at all in their houses.

  Then the doorbell rang, and Jane let in yet another teenager. At least this one was a girl, Jane’s friend Eliza, improving the girl-to-boy ratio. But Batty was no closer to her piano. Good thing she did her serious practicing in the mornings before school, before these invasions.

  “I suppose I should give up and just do my homework,” she said.

  “I already did mine,” said Ben. “Subtraction and spelling.”

  Ah, subtraction and spelling. Those were the good old days, thought Batty, dragging herself back to her room to learn clouds. Plus, there was her book report problem. She needed to write ten before the end of the year, and while she’d had all year to get started, so far she hadn’t written any. It wasn’t that Batty didn’t like to read. She loved reading (not as much as Jane did, but neither did anyone else in the world). For Batty, though, reading was like having a private conversation with the book’s characters. Writing a report—making it all public—wrecked that. She’d tried reading books she didn’t like just so they wouldn’t be ruined when she had to write about them, but she never could get past the first few, awful pages.

  And this was Thursday night, and every Friday, her teacher Ms. Rho, obsessive book report enthusiast, made a big fuss over the chart that recorded how many reports each student had handed in so far. Maybe Batty could force herself to write one tonight for Ms. Rho—just one—and thus avoid what she’d had to endure every Friday for months now, her teacher’s look of disappointment, tinged with the tiniest bit of scorn.

  Batty drifted toward her little bookcase, meaning to look at the books, but first she had to stop by the bed to say hello to two stuffed animals lounging on the pillow. One was Funty, a blue elephant who had been with Batty forever. The other was a tiger named Gibson, one of a revolving set of friends who got to hang out with Funty. A few months ago it had been Ursula the bear. Next up would be Fred, the other bear.

  “Hi, guys,” she said.

  “Hi, Batty,” she replied, then sighed, and made it all the way to the bookcase.

  And greeted the pictures she kept there of Hound. None of them were much good, mostly fuzzy and out-of-focus snapshots, as if he’d always been dashing away from or toward the camera. It was her fault, Batty knew, that she’d never thought to get a better one while he was still alive. Occasionally she was haunted by a vague memory of one framed picture that had captured his essential Hound-ness, his empathy and intelligence, but she’d searched for it through the entire house and had found nothing. Probably she’d made it up.

  “Hi, sweet dog,” she said, this time with no reply.

  Okay, book reports. She bent down to look at the bottom shelf, where her least favorite books ended up. She pulled out one that she’d managed to get through, about an interesting kind of magic but with a lot of extra-silly stuff about groundhogs thrown in. If she could stand thinking about it
again, she could possibly squeeze a book report out of it.

  But the bookcase was near the window, and the window was open, and in through the window wafted the heady scent of damp earth and fresh green growing things, drawing Batty like a siren song. And soon the groundhog book had dropped to the floor and Batty was leaning out the window, breathing in spring.

  Now, what was this? Teenagers in the yard? Couldn’t they be content taking over the inside? Must they be outside, too? These were Skye’s friends, kicking around a soccer ball, calling softly to each other. Batty recognized most of them—Pearson, Katy, Molly, Asante—and there was Skye, her blond hair shimmering in the deepening dusk. Batty couldn’t remember a time when Skye wasn’t constantly doing soccer drills, and Jane, too, though Jane never worked as hard as Skye.

  Molly was the first to notice Batty up there in the window. “Hey, Batty. Come down and play?”

  “No, thanks.” Batty had known Molly for years and wasn’t shy with her. It wasn’t just shyness, though, that kept Batty from wanting to join them at soccer but also her complete lack of talent for kicking, throwing, or catching balls of any size or shape. Although she didn’t mind, not really, it was impossible not to have some envy for Skye’s strength and grace, her relentless pursuit of perfection.

  Now Molly was down there trying to convince Skye that they should once again try to teach Batty some rudimentary skills.

  “There’s no point,” Batty heard Skye say. “She’s hopeless at sports.”

  “I am hopeless, Molly!” Batty called down. “It’s true!”

  Skye looked up at her sister. “That reminds me—Jeffrey’s visiting this weekend. He said I should let you know he’ll be here on Saturday.”

  Batty almost fell out the window with excitement. “When? When on Saturday?”

  But Skye had already turned away, dribbling the ball back into the game.

  Well, Saturday was good enough, no matter what time he arrived. Jeffrey! Jeffrey, Jeffrey, Jeffrey! A teenager, yes, but one of the few outside Batty’s family that she was always delighted to see. Indeed, he wasn’t truly outside the family, having been brought in as an honorary member one summer years ago when the four original Penderwick sisters first met him. They would have gone further if they could, adopting him even, to get him away from his selfish and awful mother, but because such matters are more easily dreamt of than done, the second choice—making him an honorary Penderwick—had been settled upon. And so Jeffrey had remained all these years, even after he’d found his missing—and quite wonderfully unselfish—father, making life much nicer for both of them.