“What good girls we have,” said Mrs. Quimby when she returned from work with her waistline no larger than it had been the day before. However, she did look tired, and on the way home, had bought a pizza for dinner. Since pizzas were an extravagance in the Quimby household, this meant she did not feel like cooking dinner.
By Wednesday Ramona began to dread being good because being good was boring, so she was happy to see Howie coming down the street, wheeling his bicycle with his unicycle balanced across the seat and handle-bars. She was even happier when he laid both on her driveway. Ramona met him at the door.
“Come on out, Ramona,” said Howie. “Uncle Hobart helped me learn to ride my unicycle, so now you can ride my bicycle.”
Ramona’s wish had come true. “Hey, Beezus,” she shouted, “I’m going out and ride Howie’s bike.”
“You’re supposed to ask first,” said Beezus. “You can’t go out unless I say so.”
Ramona felt that Beezus was showing off in front of Howie. “How come you’re so bossy all of a sudden?” she demanded.
“Mom and Dad left me in charge, and you have to mind,” answered Beezus.
“You talk the way you and Mary Jane used to talk when you played house and made me be the baby. Well, I’m not a baby now.” Ramona grew more determined and contrary. “Mom always lets me go out and play with Howie.”
“Just the same, if you get hurt, I’m responsible,” said Beezus.
“You’re just being mean,” said Ramona. “So long, Pizzaface.” Just before she slammed the door, she was horrified to see Beezus’s face crumple, as if she were about to burst into tears.
Howie cried out, “Ramona, look at me!”
Ramona watched Howie mount his unicycle and ride it to the corner and back, but as she watched, she felt puzzled and uncomfortable. She had made Beezus unhappy, but why? She did not understand. She had called Beezus Pieface many times without upsetting her. What was so different about Pizzaface? She happened to think of it because they had eaten pizza the night before, and pizza was a sort of pie.
“Good work, Howie,” said Ramona when he had ridden to the corner and back a second time. But what about me? She thought, still worrying about Beezus. I can’t spend the rest of my life sitting on a couch being good.
“Come on, ride my bike,” said Howie. “Let’s see if we can make it around the block.”
Ramona raised Howie’s bicycle, made sure one pedal was high and the other low so she would have a good start, mounted, and rode wobbling down the sidewalk.
“Atta girl, Ramona,” said Howie, seating himself on his unicycle and pedaling ahead of her.
Ramona wobbled along after him, and as she wobbled, she worried. What was Beezus going to say to their mother and father? Would she have to go back to the Kemps’?
By the time Ramona reached the corner, she was less wobbly. She even managed to turn the corner without tipping over. She began to pedal faster. Now she was really riding, filled with joy, as if she were flying.
Ramona passed Howie. She stood up on the pedals to go faster. Ramona’s mind was on speed, not balance, and at the next corner, as she turned, she lost control. Down she went, with the bicycle on top of her. Her left knee and elbow hurt; her breath was knocked out of her.
Howie dropped his unicycle and came running to lift his bicycle from Ramona. “You okay?” he asked.
Ramona rose stiffly to her feet. “I don’t think anything’s broken,” she said, struggling not to cry. Blood was running down her scraped elbow and soaking the knee of her jeans. Limping, she wheeled the bicycle, and Howie wheeled his unicycle, as far as her driveway.
“Come back again, Howie,” said Ramona. “I love to ride your bicycle, even if I did take a spill.”
“Sure, Ramona,” agreed Howie. “You better go mop up all that blood.”
When Ramona went to the back door so she wouldn’t bleed on the living room carpet, she had to knock because the door was locked. When Beezus opened it, she ignored her sister’s dripping blood and returned to her room without speaking.
Ramona limped to the bathroom. Maybe she could make Beezus speak if she let her know she had been right, that Ramona had hurt herself when she disobeyed. She said in her most pitiful voice, “Beezus, I had a bad fall. Come and help me.”
“I don’t care, you hateful little creep,” was her sister’s answer. “Serves you right. I’m not speaking to you anymore. It’s not my fault my face is all red and blotchy like a pizza.”
What Ramona heard left her speechless, ashamed, and angry. She had hurt her sister’s feelings accidentally; Beezus had hurt hers on purpose, and she didn’t even care that Ramona was dripping blood. She was probably glad. Bossy old Beezus.
Ramona washed her own knee and elbow, sprayed them with disinfectant, plastered them with Band-Aids, and changed into clean jeans and a long-sleeved blouse to hide her wounds. She then lifted Picky-picky to the couch, sat down beside him to read and be good Ramona again.
Ramona, however, found she could not read, she felt so terrible, even though she was angry, about hurting her sister’s feelings in a way she had not intended. The girls often called one another names—Beezus called Ramona Dribblepuss when her ice cream melted from a cone and trickled down her chin—but they never used really unkind names. Now Beezus called her a hateful little creep and meant it. And what if Beezus told their mother and father they had quarreled? Then it would be back to the Kemps’ for Ramona.
Good girl that she was, Ramona decided to set the table. She heard Beezus go into the bathroom and wash her face before coming into the kitchen. Picky-picky managed to get down from the couch and follow her, in case she decided to feed him. Beezus scrubbed four potatoes and put them in the oven to bake. Then she picked up the cat, hugged and petted him. “Nice Picky-picky,” she said so Ramona could hear. This, of course, meant that Ramona was not nice.
However, when their parents came home, Beezus acted as if nothing had happened, and so did Ramona—except they both talked to their mother and father but not to one another. Ramona thought maybe the white uniform her mother wore to work in the doctor’s office looked tighter at the waist. Perhaps it had shrunk, or last night’s pizza had been fattening, or maybe Beezus was right—she was going to have a baby.
As the family was about to sit down to dinner, the telephone rang, and since Mrs. Quimby happened to be standing near it, she answered. “Oh, I’m fine,” she said.
Ramona wanted to look at Beezus. However, they were not only not speaking, they were not looking. She listened intently to their mother’s side of the telephone conversation.
Mrs. Quimby was smiling. “Yes…yes, of course. I think that’s a great idea…no, it doesn’t hurt to try, so go ahead…it sounds like fun. Let me know how it turns out.”
“What sounds like fun?” demanded Ramona and Beezus at the same time.
“Oh—something,” said Mrs. Quimby airily, and winked at her husband. “I can’t remember exactly what.”
“You winked at Daddy,” Ramona accused her mother, as if winking were somehow wicked.
“Mom! You’re fibbing!” cried Beezus in exasperation. “You can too remember.”
“It isn’t nice to talk about things in front of people and not tell them what you are talking about.” Ramona suffered from curiosity as much as Beezus.
“Who called?” asked Mr. Quimby.
Ha! thought Ramona, now we’ve got her. She won’t fib to Dad.
“Howie’s mother,” said Mrs. Quimby. “She needed some information.”
“Oh,” was all the girls’ father had to say.
“Is it about a birthday party?” asked Ramona, because her mother had mentioned fun.
“Never mind, Ramona,” said her mother. “Just eat your dinner.”
“Well, is it?” persisted Ramona.
“No, it isn’t a birthday party,” said Mrs. Quimby, “and it doesn’t concern you.”
Ramona hoped her mother was still fibbing. She wanted fun to conce
rn herself.
The parents did not notice that the girls were not speaking—or if they did, they chose not to mention the matter.
After dinner, Mrs. Quimby said she was a little tired and thought she would go to bed and read awhile. The girls avoided looking at one another, even though the remark was significant.
“I’ll do the dishes,” volunteered Mr. Quimby as the girls cleared the table. “Then I’ll work on my lesson plan for tomorrow’s practice teaching.” He lowered his voice. “And I want to make one thing clear to you girls. You are not to do anything to worry your mother. Do you understand?”
The girls nodded, avoiding one another’s eyes. From the exasperation in their father’s voice, they knew he understood they had quarreled. Beezus went off to her room.
Ramona yearned to follow her sister, to say she was sorry, that she had not meant Pizzaface the way Beezus thought she meant it, to find out what Beezus thought of the mysterious telephone call, to ask when she thought her mother was going to have a baby—if she was. However, Ramona was not used to saying she was sorry, especially to someone who was bossy and called her a hateful little creep. Little creep she could overlook, but not hateful little creep.
4
Picky-picky
Strangely, when Ramona’s heart was heavy, so were her feet. She trudged to the school bus, plodded through the halls at school, and clumped home from the bus after school. The house felt lonely when she let herself in, so she turned on the television set for company. She sat on the couch and stared at one of the senseless soap operas Mrs. Kemp watched. They were all about rich people—none of them looking like Howie’s Uncle Hobart—who accused other people of doing something terrible; Ramona didn’t understand exactly what, but it all was boring, boring, boring.
Beezus came home, left her books in her room, and probably hung up her jacket instead of throwing it on her bed. She then went to the basement door, her back saying silently to Ramona, You didn’t let Picky-picky out. Ramona realized she had not let the cat out because she had not heard him meow.
When Beezus opened the door, no cat came out to investigate his dish. Beezus snapped on the basement light and descended the steps.
That’s funny, thought Ramona.
“Ramona!” screamed Beezus. “Come quick!”
At last! Beezus had spoken, but her voice told Ramona something dreadful must have happened. Frightened, Ramona ran down the basement steps, skipping the last two and jumping to the concrete floor. Her sister needed her.
Beezus, with her hands clasped to her chest, was standing over Picky-picky’s basket. “He’s dead.” Beezus stared at the motionless cat in disbelief, tears in her eyes. “Picky-picky is dead.”
“How can he be?” asked Ramona. “He was alive this morning.” Both girls had forgotten, or at least put aside, their feelings toward one another.
“He just is,” said Beezus. “I don’t know why, unless he died of old age. I started to pick him up, and he’s all limp and cold. Go ahead and touch him and you’ll see.”
Ramona summoned courage to touch timidly with one finger the lifeless Picky-picky. He felt like cold, limp fur.
“What are we going to do?” asked distraught Beezus.
“Wait till Mother and Daddy come home,” suggested Ramona.
“But Daddy said we weren’t to worry Mother,” Beezus reminded her. The sisters looked helplessly at one another. “I know we didn’t do anything to Picky-picky, but I think coming home and finding a dead cat in the basement would upset her a lot.”
“Yes,” agreed Ramona. “It sure would, especially at dinner time.” The two looked sadly at the remains of their pet. “I guess we should bury him,” said Ramona, “and have a funeral.”
“We’ll have to hurry,” said Beezus, “and I don’t know if I can dig a grave.” She lifted her father’s heavy shovel from the wall, where it hung upside down between two nails, and started up the steps. “Come on, help me find a place.”
Ramona was glad to follow. Somehow she did not want to be alone with the ghost of Picky-picky. Silly, but that was the way she felt.
The girls walked across the wet grass to choose a spot in the corner of the backyard where their father had grubbed out an old laurel bush that had grown too large for the space. Beezus jabbed the shovel into the muddy soil, stepped on the top of the blade to push it farther down, lifted out a shovelful of dirt, and laid it aside. “What will we bury him in?” she asked, struggling with another shovelful of wet dirt.
“I’ll find a box.” Now that Beezus was speaking to her, Ramona was eager to do her part. Besides, even though she felt sad and awed by her first experience with the death of someone she knew—birds didn’t count—burying the cat was interesting. In the basement she picked up a cardboard carton and ran upstairs. In her room she found a doll’s pillow and two doll’s blankets. She lined the box with one blanket and placed the pillow at one end. She forced herself to return to the basement, where she found she could not bring herself to lift the lifeless Picky-picky. She would leave that to Beezus.
Out in the backyard, Ramona found Beezus panting as she wrestled with the shovel. “Let me try,” she offered, but soon discovered the shovel was too long and unwieldy for her to manage. “I’ll get a trowel,” she said. Together, the girls worked, Ramona on her knees digging with the trowel and finally with her hands, until they had dug a small grave just right for a cat. “Beezus, will you put Picky-picky in the box?” asked Ramona. “I’m—not exactly scared, but I don’t want to.”
Back in the basement, Beezus lifted Picky-picky into his cardboard coffin and laid his head on the pillow. Ramona tucked the second doll blanket around him, and together they set the lid in place.
Beezus carried the box out to the gravesite. “It doesn’t seem right just to bury him,” she said, “and I don’t remember much about Grandma Day’s funeral except everyone whispered, there were lots of flowers, and I had to sit very still. You were just a baby then.”
Ramona knew about funerals. “On TV when they bury somebody, they stand around the grave and pray,” she said. “Then the wife of the dead person cries until someone leads her away.”
“I suppose we should pray.” Beezus sounded uncertain as to the proper way to pray for a cat.
Ramona had no doubts. She bowed her head and began, “Now I lay me down to sleep—”
“That’s not right,” interrupted Beezus. “You’re not the one who’s being buried.”
“Oh. Okay.” Ramona began again. “Now we lay Picky-picky down to sleep. We pray thee, Lord, his soul to keep. Thy love stay with him through the night and wake him with the morning light. Amen.” When she finished the prayer, she said, “There. That’s that.”
Beezus frowned in thought. “But he won’t wake with the morning light. He isn’t supposed to. He’s dead.”
Ramona was not worried. “Cats have nine lives, so tomorrow he will wake up someplace as somebody’s kitten and start a new life.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Beezus, “but it sounds logical. I hope his new owners give him melon rind. Picky-picky loved melon rind.” She picked up the shovel and began to fill in the grave. “We should have some flowers for him, but there aren’t any.”
“I wonder which of his lives we got him on,” said Ramona as she gathered damp brown leaves to strew on the grave. The girls stood looking sadly at the little mound left by Picky-picky’s coffin. “He was a good cat,” said Ramona, “even if he didn’t like me much when I was little.”
“I can barely remember when he was a little tiny kitten who climbed the curtains,” said Beezus.
“I’ll make him a tombstone.” After sharing the sad experience, Ramona felt closer to her sister, close enough to speak of something other than their cat.
“Beezus—” she said with a gulp. “I’m sorry about yesterday when I called you—you know—and I didn’t mean it the way you took it.” She explained how she happened to change Pieface to Pizzaface. “I didn’t mean to h
urt your feelings. I—I won’t say it again, no matter how mad I get.”
“That’s okay,” said Beezus with a big sigh. “I shouldn’t have been so cross with you. Mom says I’ll outgrow skin problems, but it seems like forever. Now maybe I better put something on these blisters on my hands.”
In spite of the funeral, Ramona felt light and happy. She and her sister had both apologized and forgiven one another. “And we didn’t worry Mother,” Ramona pointed out as she skipped off to the basement to find a short board in a pile of scrap lumber.
By the time Beezus had changed out of her muddy clothes, scrubbed her hands, applied disinfectant, and covered her blisters with Band-Aids, the grave bore a marker made from a scrap of board. Printed in crayon were the words:
Beneath the words, Ramona had drawn a picture of a yellow cat.
“But we’ll have to tell Mother and Daddy,” said Beezus. “They’re sure to miss him.”
“Won’t that upset Mother?” asked Ramona.
Beezus was filled with uncertainty. “Well—I don’t think our burying him will upset her as much as finding him dead in the basement.” She rearranged the Band-Aids on her hands. “You’d better get into some clean clothes, or she’ll really be upset. And don’t forget to use the nailbrush on your fingernails.”
Before Ramona had time to change her clothes, her parents came home. As Mr. Quimby set a bag of groceries on the kitchen counter, he looked at his younger daughter and remarked with a grin, “Add water and get instant Ramona. You’d better add some soap, too.”
Mrs. Quimby, used to seeing Ramona covered with dirt, only said, “I found a bargain in cat food.”
Ramona exchanged an anguished look with her sister and went off to scrub her hands and change to clean clothes. What a waste of money, buying cat food now. The sisters exchanged another anguished look when Ramona returned to set the table. Beezus was washing lettuce with the tips of her fingers to keep her Band-Aids dry.
Ramona Forever Page 3