The minister said, “Abraham Lincoln said, ‘Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.’” So Isabelle listened. She liked Mr. Lincoln very much.
“If that’s true,” the minister continued, “being happy shouldn’t be as elusive as it seems. One way to happiness is to do things for other people. Try doing a good deed and not telling anyone about it. Try using a gentle word instead of a sharp one. Be nice to someone you don’t particularly like. Remember, happiness comes from within.”
On the way home, Isabelle’s mother turned to look at her.
“That was an unusually good sermon, I thought,” she said, giving Isabelle a piercing look. “Did you listen, Isabelle?”
“I like Abraham Lincoln. We studied him last week,” Isabelle said. “Some guy shot him while he was watching a play.”
“That was John Wilkes Booth, dummy,” Philip said loftily. “Anybody knows that.”
“I hope when I get in the eighth grade, I won’t be as much of a know-it-all as you are,” Isabelle said.
“It was what I was talking about to you the other day,” her mother said. “Remember?”
Isabelle rolled down the window. Cold air rushed in. She sneezed. Once, twice, three times. She always sneezed in threes.
“You’re getting a cold. Are you constipated?” her mother asked.
“Shut that!” her father yelled.
“Use a gentle word instead of a harsh one,” Isabelle said.
Under his breath, Philip sang, “Constipation.”
Isabelle stuffed her fingers in her ears. They rode the rest of the way in silence.
11
Aunt Maude’s Volkswagen was pulled up in front of the house when they got home from church. Aunt Maude stopped in every Sunday after church.
“I can only stay a minute,” she said, undoing her fur piece. She said that every Sunday.
“Oh, stay for dinner,” Isabelle’s mother said.
“I wouldn’t think of it,” Aunt Maude said.
She always stayed.
Aunt Maude was a very little woman who wore very big hats. When she got behind the wheel of her Volkswagen, all you could see was Aunt Maude’s hat. If she hadn’t worn one, people would probably have thought no one was driving the car. In those hats, she looked like a toadstool. She had tiny feet and wore tiny shoes with very tall heels. Every week Isabelle and Philip bet each other as to whether or not Aunt Maude would make it up the front path, she teetered and tottered so dangerously on those heels.
She always made it, fair weather or foul. She never even sprained her ankle.
“If she falls down and sprains her ankle,” Isabelle often said, “we’d have to call an ambulance, I suppose, and maybe even a police car.”
“She wouldn’t need an ambulance for a sprained ankle,” Philip said scornfully. “A sprain’s never as good as an actual break.”
“Would we have to call an ambulance for a broken leg?” Isabelle asked.
“Maybe,” Philip said. “It’s hard to say. It would depend on whether it was the femur or the tibia she broke.”
Isabelle pondered but did not admit to his superior knowledge.
“How about a police car?” she finally asked. “I thought you called the police when somebody had an accident.”
Philip snorted. “Only if she wrapped her car around a telephone pole, and she doesn’t drive fast enough for that. The police are too busy to come, except for an emergency,” he said, as if he knew.
“I sure would like to have a police car in front of our house,” Isabelle said wistfully. “Herbie’d see it and Mary Eliza Shook. It’d drive her crazy. I bet she never had a police car in front of her stinky old house. With the siren going and the red lights flashing and everything. And Chauncey Lapidus. He’d make up a story about how that car was really on its way to his house only it got lost. That Chauncey is some liar.”
“Do I smell roast beef?” Aunt Maude asked. “Usually I don’t take much in the middle of the day, just an apple and a cup of soup.”
Isabelle fixed her brown eyes on her father, but he wouldn’t look at her. Last week, after Aunt Maude had left, Isabelle had heard him tell her mother that, for such a small person, Aunt Maude certainly put away a lot of food.
Isabelle went upstairs and put her hat on. Aunt Maude always wore her hat at the table and Isabelle thought that was sort of neat. Just like in a restaurant. Isabelle’s hat was red and it had a ripply brim which she pulled down over her eyes. She’d fished it out of the lost-and-found at school and no one had ever claimed it.
Everybody watched her father carve the roast beef. He hated to carve, but he said he wouldn’t feel like a man if he let her mother carve. So every Sunday he breathed heavily and muttered to himself while he carved.
Isabelle passed the rolls. She was hungry.
“May I ask what you’re doing?” her mother asked.
“I’m passing the rolls,” Isabelle said.
“The hat. Take it off.”
“Why?” Isabelle asked. “Aunt Maude always wears hers.”
“Either remove it or yourself,” her father said.
Isabelle sat on her hat. How come it’s all right if Aunt Maude wears her hat at the table and I can’t, she asked silently. She’d have to check this later.
“That’s a lovely cut of beef,” Aunt Maude said. “I imagine it cost a fortune.” She was very interested in what things cost.
“Well, it wasn’t cheap,” Isabelle’s mother said. “Stop fingering the silverware,” she directed Isabelle, and, “Philip, put your napkin in your lap.”
Sometimes her mother reminded Isabelle of a general, she gave so many orders.
Aunt Maude’s fur piece lay on a chair in the living room and looked at Isabelle throughout the meal. It reminded her of Mary Eliza Shook. It had a nasty little face and a pointy chin. Isabelle felt as if Mary Eliza were looking at her all during dinner. She started making faces at the fur piece.
“Knock it off, Isabelle,” her father said. “Another little sliver?” he asked Aunt Maude.
“Just a very small piece,” Aunt Maude passed her plate.
“A growing girl like you needs nourishment,” he said, giving her a lovely thick slice with no fat on it that Isabelle had been planning on for herself. She hated fat.
“I saw your friend Mary Eliza Shook in the five-and-ten yesterday,” Isabelle’s mother said. “She has such lovely manners. She was on her way to ballet lessons. She practices every day, she told me. Imagine!”
Isabelle crossed her eyes. “Mary Eliza Shook is a terrible loser,” she said. “When we play baseball and she strikes out, she throws the bat at people.”
Aunt Maude held up a finger. “Not on Sunday,” she said. “On Sunday we must be full of Christian charity.”
“Another piece, Maude?” Isabelle’s father asked.
“Just a tiny one,” she said.
Watching Aunt Maude eat, Isabelle thought that Christian charity wasn’t all she was full of on Sunday.
After dinner was over, Isabelle and Philip cleared the table.
“You just put your feet up and rest,” Isabelle’s mother said to Aunt Maude, who had a tendency to break things.
When she’d finished her job, Isabelle stood on her head to watch television. She found it more interesting that way.
“Why does the child do that?” Aunt Maude asked. “She makes me feel all queasy in the stomach.”
When the spots in front of her eyes became too numerous to count and the roaring in her ears drowned out the sound, Isabelle righted herself and watched Aunt Maude try to stay awake.
It was a battle. Tiny feet in tiny shoes planted firmly, her big hat on her head, Aunt Maude fought off sleep as if it were an enemy.
Slowly, slowly, her head drooped until it hit her chest, blip! Aunt Maude’s eyes opened and she looked around to see if anyone had noticed. After a bit, she’d fall off again and start to snore. Not a loud snore, like Isabelle’s father’s, but a tinkly
little snore that barely made the roses on her hat wobble.
Once, Isabelle had invited Herbie over to watch Aunt Maude fall asleep. That was the one time she hadn’t. She’d stayed awake and talked.
Herbie had said, “Always making up stories,” to Isabelle. He had been disgusted.
The doorbell rang and when Isabelle answered it, there stood Herbie with his father’s army hat on. Aunt Maude looked over Isabelle’s shoulder.
“My lands,” she said, “he looks like just a baby to me. I didn’t know they were taking them that young.”
Herbie scowled. He didn’t like being told he looked like a baby. By Aunt Maude or anyone else.
“Come on out and fight,” he said. “But no fair using feet.”
“On Sunday?” Aunt Maude was shocked. “I don’t think that’s the proper thing to do on Sunday. When I was a girl, we weren’t allowed to as much as play cards on Sunday. And now this!”
“That’s a neat hat,” Herbie told Aunt Maude.
She was very pleased. “Thank you,” she said. “I think people don’t take enough interest in hats these days, don’t you agree?”
But Herbie was too busy rolling in the dirt with Isabelle to answer. After they’d fought for about half an hour and Isabelle was winning, Herbie said, “Hey, I hear my mother calling me.”
Isabelle stopped banging his head on the ground to listen. “I don’t hear her,” she said. Herbie skinned out from her clutches and ran away.
Isabelle chased him home but she didn’t catch him. He’d had a head start, that was why.
“You’re nothing but a whippersnapper,” she shouted under his window. Herbie hated to be called a whippersnapper more than anything.
“A big fat whippersnapper!”
After a while, it started to rain and a cold wind came up, so Isabelle gave up and went home. All in all, it hadn’t been a bad day.
She would’ve written HERBIE IS A BIG FAT WHIPPERSNAPPER on her blackboard, but she didn’t know how to spell whippersnapper. So she settled for HERBIE IS A FINK TOO.
12
“Did you call up on Saturday and make a loud noise over the telephone?” Mary Eliza demanded Monday morning.
Toe, heel, toe, tap, shuffle.
“Not me,” Isabelle said. “It was probably Chauncey.”
“Did we ever have a good time at Sally’s! It was the best!” Mary Eliza rolled her eyes and rubbed her stomach. “We didn’t get to sleep until practically morning.”
“So?” Isabelle retorted. “So?”
The new girl walked by, her head turned away from them.
“Hello, there,” Mary Eliza said brightly. Jane looked startled, bobbed her head in greeting and scuttled past.
“She’s very timid,” Mary Eliza said. “She wouldn’t even go to Sally’s party. If you ask me, she was afraid.”
“Who did? Ask you, that is?” Isabelle said.
“Listen, dear,” Mary Eliza made a swipe at Isabelle, trying for her arm, “I think I should tell you. I think it’s only fair.”
Punch, punch. Isabelle got in a few good ones on Mary Eliza’s shoulder.
“You got the lowest mark in the spelling test,” Mary Eliza yelled. “I just happened to be passing Mrs. Esposito’s desk and I just happened to see your paper.”
“You just happen to be the biggest pain in the neck I ever knew in my whole entire life!” Isabelle shouted. “I never want to speak to you again.”
“Don’t. See if I care,” Mary Eliza said.
“You go home and get your scanties,” Isabelle sang, dancing.
Mary Eliza leaped and twirled, a smile on her face in case a photographer were around.
Isabelle stuck out her foot to make Mary Eliza go splat. But Mary Eliza nimbly avoided the foot and came to rest in a pose that made her look like a sea gull landing on a beach.
“That’s an arabesque,” she explained.
“Who can’t do an arabesque?” Isabelle did one of her own. “That’s a cinch. Even old green-toothed Chauncey can do one.”
“I see London, I see France, I see Izzy’s underpants.”
Chauncey appeared as if on cue.
“Guess who got the lowest mark in the spelling test?” Mary Eliza asked. “Mrs. Esposito wants to see her.”
Stiff-legged, Isabelle stomped in to see Mrs. Esposito. Mary Eliza pasted to her side, trying to link arms. Chauncey brought up the rear.
The only person in the room besides Mrs. Esposito was the new girl, Jane, working very industriously at something, her head bent down so that her chin almost touched her desk.
“My father’s making cheese bread Saturday,” Isabelle said. “You want me to bring you some?”
Mrs. Esposito gazed at the ceiling.
“Isabelle, how can you do this to me? I gain three pounds every time I eat his marvelous bread.”
“You want me not to bring you some?”
“I didn’t say that,” Mrs. Esposito said hastily. “How about half a loaf? Do you think he’d cut a loaf in half for me?”
“Sure. Half a loaf’s better’n none, I guess.”
“Listen, Isabelle,” Mrs. Esposito said, “I want you to stay after school. I have a list of the words you misspelled on the test and I think it would help if you wrote them out ten times each.”
“I have to do my brother’s paper route this afternoon,” Isabelle protested. “He’s paying me to do it and I might even have to collect.”
“Liar,” Chauncey said. “You’re too young to deliver papers. You’re only ten. I’m going to call up the paper and tell ’em they’re using child labor and they’ll probably go to jail. So will you.”
“That’s enough Chauncey.” Mrs. Esposito turned to Isabelle. “You can do much better, Isabelle, if only you’d set your mind to it.”
“I promise I’ll do the words at home,” Isabelle said. “But I have to do Philip’s route right after school. Please, Mrs. Esposito?” Isabelle begged.
“All right. If you promise. Everybody get to his seat now,” she said as the room filled up.
“Liar, liar,” Chauncey said under his breath.
“Old fat green tooth Chauncey,” Isabelle whispered, catching him a good one with her friendship ring.
“I think I’m having a slumber party,” Mary Eliza said to everyone and no one.
“Order, please,” Mrs. Esposito raised her voice.
LIFE ISN’T EASY Isabelle wrote in big letters on her paper. The words popped into her head for no reason.
LIFE ISN’T EASY she wrote again. Every word was spelled perfectly.
You can do much better, she told herself.
13
“If you’re going to help me deliver, you’ve gotta take that off,” Isabelle said when school was out. She pointed to Herbie’s boil, which hung precariously from the end of his nose. “Philip said you couldn’t go with me if you had it on.”
Reluctantly, Herbie took the lump of chewing gum and put it in the plastic sandwich bag he’d saved from his lunch.
“It stays real nice and clean in there,” he explained.
“If you’re coming, come on.” Isabelle took giant steps.
“I have to let my mother know where I’m going. She has fits if she doesn’t know where I am,” Herbie said.
“Parents always want to know where you are. Half the time you’re not where you tell ’em you’re going to be, so what difference does it make?” Isabelle asked.
“Maybe you’re being kidnapped or fell down a well or something and they have to call the police or the fire engines. It makes ’em feel better if they know where you are even if you’re not there,” Herbie explained.
“How far does this route take you?” Herbie’s mother asked suspiciously when they told her about delivering papers. She didn’t trust Isabelle.
“Up Blackberry Lane,” Isabelle said, making vague motions, indicating the journey, “then around to the left and down. It’s a long way,” she added. Herbie’s mother was about to fire more questions. �
�I gotta go.” She started down the path.
“See you later,” Herbie shouted, taking off fast before his mother got a chance to stop him.
When they got to the drop-off box, a bunch of guys with long hair and pimples were standing around, smoking cigarettes and talking in loud voices.
“Looka here,” one said when Isabelle opened the box to get Philip’s papers. “Whatcha want, kid? Your mama know you’re out all by yourself?”
Herbie stood off to one side with his finger in his nose. He always stuck his finger up his nose when he was scared.
“I said, whatcha want, kid?” the guy said again, coming toward them.
“My brother’s papers,” Isabelle said. “I’m doing his route.”
“You gotta be kidding! A pipsqueak like you! Hey, you guys hear the little lady? She’s doing her brother’s route. How about that!”
The rest of them stood around, spitting and smoking and not doing much else, peering out from behind their hair.
“Where’s the fire?” Herbie demanded crossly when they were finally on their way.
“Listen,” Isabelle said, “you gotta shape up if you want to come with me. No more finger up your nose. We’re going to see Mrs. Stern first and if she sees you like that, she won’t ask us in or anything.”
“Who’s Mrs. Stern?”
“She’s really old, only she paints and cleans out her gutters and everything. She has silver eyes, too.”
The combination was too much for Herbie. He hid behind Isabelle as she knocked on Mrs. Stern’s pink door.
Once, twice, three times, she knocked.
“She’s probably deaf,” Herbie whispered hoarsely.
“Are you kidding?” Isabelle said scornfully.
“I thought I heard someone, but with the blender going I wasn’t sure.” Mrs. Stern had on a navy blue T-shirt with CAPE COD written across the front and paint-spattered pants. “Come in and try some carrot juice.”
“Yuck,” said Herbie. Isabelle stepped on his foot, hard.
“Mrs. Stern, this is my friend Herbie. He’s helping me deliver today. Just for today,” she said firmly.
“Hello, Herbie.” Mrs. Stern shook hands. Herbie put out his right hand first off.
Isabelle the Itch: The Isabelle Series, Book One Page 4