Harriet the Spy

by Louise Fitzhugh

  “No. I’m writing my memoirs.”

  Her mother, for some reason or other, laughed. She then smiled warmly at Harriet. “Both Miss Elson and Miss Harris say that you do nothing whatever anymore but write in that notebook. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “They say that I must take it away from you or you will never learn anything.”

  “I’m learning plenty.”

  “What are you learning?”

  “Everything about everybody.”

  Mrs. Welsch consulted a small slip of paper. “History, Geography, French, Science—all bad. You’re even doing badly in English. And we know you can’t add and subtract.”

  Harriet just sat there. School seemed a million miles away, a moon that she had been to once.

  “I’m afraid that you’re only going to be able to play with this notebook after school, but not during school hours.”

  “I’m not playing. Who says I’m playing? I’m WORKING!”

  “Look, dear, at the moment you’re in school, so your work is school. Just like your father works at the office, you work at school. School work is your work.”

  “What do you do?”

  “A lot of unseen, unappreciated things. That’s not the point. At the moment your work is going to school and learning, and you’re not doing that. Now you can have the notebook as soon as you come home from school. I’ll give it to the cook and you can have it just as soon as you come in.”

  “No,” said Harriet.

  “Yes. Now that’s definite,”

  “I’ll throw a tantrum.”

  “So throw, but I’m not going to stand here and watch you. Now in the morning I don’t want to see you leaving here with any notebook, nor are you to arrive at school with one. Miss Elson is going to check.”

  Harriet lay flat on her stomach on the bed. She pushed her face into the pillow.

  “Honey, is something bothering you.?”

  “No” came out very muffled.

  CHAPTER

  Thirteen

  The next morning Harriet was frisked by her mother. The notebook was taken away and given to the cook, who looked as though she might eat it.

  Harriet walked sadly to school. She dragged her feet and looked intently at the cracks in the cement. She dragged in the door, up the steps, and into her homeroom. She sat down and stared at the floor, not hearing anything around her.

  After Miss Elson had come in and they had said good morning to her, she went immediately to Harriet, made her stand up to be searched, then searched her desk. Harriet submitted limply. When no notebook was found, Miss Elson patted Harriet on the head like a good puppy and went back to her desk in the front.

  Some very interested eyes watched this whole procedure. When it was finished everyone snickered. They whispered a lot and stared at Harriet, who stared at the floor.

  Harriet did her work. She didn’t care anymore about signing her name, and she got no pleasure from the work she did, but she did it. Everything bored her. She found that when she didn’t have a notebook it was hard for her to think. The thoughts came slowly, as though they had to squeeze through a tiny door to get to her, whereas when she wrote, they flowed out faster than she could put them down. She sat very stupidly with a blank mind until finally “I feel different” came slowly into her head. She sat digesting the thought like a Thanksgiving dinner.

  Yes, she thought, after a long pause. And then, after more time, mean, I feel mean.

  She looked around with a mean look for everyone. Nobody saw her. She felt her face contorting. It was an impressive moment that everyone missed. It was a moment that Harriet would never forget.

  When the bell rang for lunch, it was as though she didn’t have to think anymore. Everything happened as though she had planned it but she really hadn’t. For example, when the bell rang Pinky Whitehead jumped up and ran down the aisle. Harriet put her foot out and he fell flat on his face.

  A terrific wail went up from his prone body, and when he raised his face his nose was bleeding. Harriet looked extremely blank. Inside she felt a sense of very personal satisfaction.

  She got up and walked quietly out, stepping delicately over Pinky’s writhing body. She knew no one would ever think of her because she had never done anything like that in her life. She went and got her tomato sandwich.

  During lunch she sat, owl-eyed, by herself. She felt her thoughts limping like crippled children. When the bell rang again, she rose like a robot and walked to the door.

  She was pushed helplessly into the crush at the door. Carrie Andrews was right in front of her. Without thought, Harriet pinched her expertly on the leg. Carrie let out a terrible scream and looked around with a wild red flush on her face.

  Harriet looked solidly ahead. No one would think of her because she had never pinched anyone in her life. Carrie Andrews, as a matter of fact, sometimes pinched, but the only one really known for pinching was Marion Hawthorne. Carrie leaned over and hit Marion in the head, even though Marion was four people away and couldn’t possibly have pinched her. A large fight started, and Harriet squeezed her way out and into math class.

  She sat, looking Miss Harris forlornly in the eye while the others filed in. Miss Harris, after making certain Harriet had no notebook, tried to smile warmly at her, but Harriet looked away.

  Without a notebook there was nothing to do but listen to Miss Harris. Having never done this before, Harriet was totally lost. Miss Harris went on and on about some bridge. Everyone copied down a lot of numbers. Harriet copied them down too but they made absolutely no sense. They went from there into a spirited discussion about buying and selling a lot of lamb chops.

  Harriet wadded up a piece of paper and, again without thought, sent it flying into Sport’s ear. Sport gave a little yelp but recovered quickly. At his next opportunity he looked around. Harriet shot him a mean look. He stared at her a minute, his eyes wide with a growing perplexity and fear. Then he looked away quickly.

  There was in process an incomprehensible discussion about boats and how many knots they went. Harriet tried to think, but it was impossible. She quite abruptly threw a pencil straight into Beth Ellen’s face.

  Beth Ellen looked horrorstruck, and when she saw Harriet looking at her, burst into loud ridiculous baby tears.

  The bell rang, and as Miss Harris scuttled over to Beth Ellen, Harriet walked to the door and down the steps. She ran home, into her house, down the steps, and bang, right into the cook.

  “How can you do it every day? Do they aim you from school right at me?”

  “Give me my notebook, please.”

  “What notebook?”

  “Whatdya mean? My NOTEBOOK. My NOTEBOOK!” Harriet had a moment of sheer panic.

  “Listen to me, you apologize for almost knocking me to the floor.” The cook stood, hands on hips, as though she had all the time in the world.

  “I apologize.”

  “All right.” She turned her back in a grumpy way and stuck her hands back into the dishwater.

  “My NOTEBOOK,” Harriet shouted.

  “Oh, all right, all right. Can’t you wait just one minute till I get this soap off my hands?”

  “No, no, no, I can’t wait. I want it NOW.”

  “All right. All right.” She washed her hands, dried them, and reached down under the sink. From way back in the back she pulled out the notebook with a little cleanser spilled on it.

  Harriet grabbed it and ran out of the room.

  “Hey, how about your cake and milk?”

  Harriet didn’t even hear. She ran into her room and flung herself on the bed. She lay quietly for a minute looking reverently at her notebook and then opened it. She had had an unreasonable fear that it would be empty, but there was her handwriting, reassuring if not beautiful. She grabbed up the pen and felt the mercy of her thoughts coming quickly, zooming through her head out the pen onto the paper. What a relief, she thought to herself; for a moment I thought I had dried up. She wrote a lot about what she fel
t, relishing the joy of her fingers gliding across the page, the sheer relief of communication. After a while she sat back and began to really think hard. Then she wrote again:

  SOMETHING IS DEFINITELY HAPPENING TO ME. I AM CHANGING. I DON’T FEEL LIKE ME AT ALL. I DON’T EVER LAUGH OR THINK ANYTHING FUNNY. I JUST FEEL MEAN ALL OVER. I WOULD LIKE TO HURT EACH ONE OF THEM IN A SPECIAL WAY THAT WOULD HURT ONLY THEM.

  And then she made a list:

  MARION HAWTHORNE: FROGS. PUT ONE IN HER DESK. A SNAKE WOULD BE BETTER.

  RACHEL HENNESSEY: HER FATHER. ASK HER WHERE HE WENT.

  LAURA PETERS: HER HAIR. CUT IT OFF. OR MAKE A BALD SPOT.

  INKY WHITEHEAD: MEAN LOOKS. THAT’S ALL HE NEEDS.

  CARRIE ANDREWS: TELL HER FATHER SOMETHING TERRIBLE ABOUT HER WHICH IS A LIE.

  BETH ELLEN HANSEN: HATES TO BE HIT. HIT HER.

  JANIE: BREAK HER LITTLE FINGER.

  SPORT: CALL HIM A SISSY AND TELL EVERYONE HE READS COOK BOOKS.

  BOY WITH THE PURPLE SOCKS:??

  She couldn’t think of anything for him because he was so dull. Well, she thought, I will watch him tomorrow.

  The next day at school Harriet concentrated on these things. She thought about them so hard she didn’t do her work at all. The only words she spoke all day were when she asked Rachel Hennessey why she didn’t have a father living in the house. Actually what she said was, “You don’t have a father, do you, Rachel?” in a fairly conversational tone.

  Rachel looked at her, horrified, and yelled, “I do TOO.”

  Harriet said briskly, “Oh, no, you don’t.”

  “I do too,” Rachel shouted.

  “Well, he doesn’t love you.”

  “He does too.”

  “Well, then why doesn’t he live with you?”

  And Rachel burst into tears.

  The next day she went to the park immediately after breakfast. She looked for a long time in the bushes and finally found a frog. It was a very small frog, maybe a baby. She picked him up very carefully so as not to squash him and put him in the pocket of her jumper. Then she ran to school, keeping her hand lightly around him so he couldn’t jump out. She ran to her homeroom and lifted the top of Marion Hawthorne’s desk. Then she carefully put the frog down inside. The frog hopped once and stared up at her peevishly. She stared back at him. She had grown rather fond of him. She hoped nothing happened to him in the confusion.

  She closed the desk softly so as not to frighten him, then sat down primly in her place. The children all came in. While they were standing up saying good morning Harriet grabbed a chunk of Laura Peters’ hair and chopped it off with some scissors she had ready. Laura Peters didn’t feel a thing. She sat down quite happily, never suspecting that she had a large chunk cut out of her hair. Harriet stared at the spot with a kind of joy.

  Just as Sport, who had seen the whole thing, was about to rat, Marion Hawthorne opened her desk.

  Harriet had never seen such confusion or heard such screams in her life. It was extremely gratifying. It was as though the whole class erupted in a volcanic shower of cries, running, yelps, and tumbling bodies. No one at first knew what had happened. Marion screamed so loudly that everyone jumped up. Then, when they saw what appeared to be a small brown spot leaping from desk to desk, onto a child’s shoulder, onto another desk, from there to an arm, they lost their heads completely without being able to tell what about. In the confusion Harriet got up quietly and walked home.

  When she came in, the cook said in a very quiet voice, “What are you doing? You’re not supposed to be home?”

  “I’m just home.”

  “But why are you home?” the cook said ever so softly.

  “Why are you whispering?” shouted Harriet.

  “I have a new cake in the oven,” whispered the cook. “It will be ready in a minute. You mustn’t bounce around, or walk heavy, or shout, because it will fall.”

  Harriet stood there. She munched a thought over in her mind. Without warning she ran to the center of the room, overturned a chair, then jumped up and down, stomping her feet with all her might.

  The cook screamed one long scream and flew to the oven. “Look what you’ve done, you terrible child. That does it. I quit. If I have to put up with you one more day I will go stark raving yelling crazy, and it’s not worth it for what I get paid.”

  Harriet left the room.

  The cook stood looking at the flat cake. It lay there in the pan as if someone had stepped on it. “There is something wrong in this house. It was never this bad before. Mrs. Welsch is going to hear from me all right, all right.”

  Harriet lay upstairs in her room all day. She didn’t look out the window or read or write in her notebook. She just lay there looking at the ceiling. Through her mind rang one single name endlessly—Ole Golly, Ole Golly, Ole Golly, Ole Golly—as though saying it would make her appear.

  In the late afternoon she could hear the cook yelling at her mother. “I’m quitting, I tell you. I’m tired of being run into every day, and being screamed at, and now she’s stomped my cake and that does it.”

  “Oh, please, don’t leave us now. We NEED you,” Harriet’s mother was almost begging.

  “I wouldn’t stay for all the money in the world. I’m leaving right now.”

  “How about a five dollar raise? I think we could see our way clear…”

  “Something better be done about that Harriet. I hate to leave you in the lurch, but she run into me one more time or pull a nasty trick like stomping my cake and that’s it.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’m a COOK. I’m not a NURSE.”

  Harriet in her room thought, Ole Golly, Ole Golly, Ole Golly.

  “Of course, I understand completely.”

  Cook retired loudly to the kitchen, and Harriet’s mother came up the steps. Harriet could hear her coming. She kept looking at the ceiling. There was a pattern there made by the leaves of a tree outside the window, a very interesting pattern which changed over and over.

  “Harriet, what is the matter with you?” Her mother stood in the doorway. Harriet didn’t answer and inside the song went, Ole Golly, please, please, Ole Golly.

  “Harriet, do you know what my day has been like? I had a frantic call at the hairdresser’s to come to your school immediately. I went over there and heard how you had spent your morning. That Laura Peters is practically going to have to have her head shaved. Marion Hawthorne went home sick and Miss Elson was on the verge of tears, she was so wrought up. She’ll probably never get over it. She says it was bedlam for hours. Then I come home to find the cook quitting. Well, luckily I saved that situation, but, Harriet, this has gone too far. Now you’re going to have to sit up and talk to me. What do you think you’re doing?”

  Harriet didn’t move. Inside the song had stopped and she felt a dim sense of pleasure side by side with a swelling current of fear.

  “Harriet?”

  She lay there.

  Her mother turned and left the room, saying as she went, “Your father will be home in an hour. If you’re not talking to me by then you’ll have to talk to him.” Harriet lay there the rest of the afternoon watching the leaf pattern change and fade. She heard her father come in.

  “I just can’t cope with this kind of thing. I come home from the office and I want some peace and quiet and a martini. I come home tonight and the ice bucket isn’t even filled, you are practically raving, I can hear that fink of a cook all the way from the kitchen—she is yelling so loud—and you tell me you just gave her a five dollar raise. Now make sense, woman!”

  There was a lot of mumbling and then a door closed. Her mother had taken her father into the library. Everyone always went into the library to be fussed at.

  She lay in the dark and stared at nothing. She didn’t blame her father for being angry. It was all so boring. When she closed her eyes sometimes she saw a yellow spot. She almost fell asleep. A slant of light fell across her face and she opened one eye a crack, to see her father standing i
n the doorway. She closed her eyes.

  “Harriet, are you asleep?”

  Harriet didn’t move.

  “Harriet, answer me.”

  Harriet just lay there, scarcely breathing.

  “Listen, I know perfectly well you’re not asleep. I used to do the same thing to my father. So you just sit up and talk to me.”

  Quickly Harriet sat up, leaned over, and in one perfectly coordinated motion threw a shoe at her father.

  “Well… of all the splutter splutter. Something has to be done.… This child—come in here. I think we’d better call… What the—” The door banged shut.

  Harriet lay there as though she had never moved, had never thrown a shoe, had never been unhappy, had never caught a frog. She thought quietly, Wait until I break Janie’s finger. Then she fell asleep quite suddenly. Late at night she awoke to feel her mother putting her pajamas on her and tucking her in. She slept blissfully.

  CHAPTER

  Fourteen

  When Harriet got up the next morning she was starving because she hadn’t had any dinner the night before. She went downstairs in her pajamas and sat down at the breakfast table.

  “Harriet, go back up and put on your clothes.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean ‘no’?” Her mother stared at her wide-eyed.

  “NO. That’s all, just no.”

  “Get up those steps this minute,” her father said, “or you’ll get a whaling you’ll never forget.”

  Harriet went back up and put on her clothes. She came back and sat down again. Neither of her parents had a paper in front of them, and they seemed to look at her a lot.

  “Did you wash?”

  “No.”

  “Then go back and wash.”

  “No.”

  “Harriet, you always go back and wash.”

  Silence.

  “Harriet, go up and wash.”

  “No.”

  Her father looked at her mother. “We are doing this none too soon, I see. But before we all get a lot of newfangled ideas, may I say, Harriet, that you are going to go upstairs right this minute and wash or you won’t be able to sit down for a week.”