The doorbell rang.
With one last glare at Nora, Sarah turned and fled. But Nora’s mother held her ground, apparently undaunted by the thought of having a guest see her wearing pajamas in the afternoon. Actually she was wearing her husband’s too-large pajamas, as her own were in the dryer.
Slowly, Nora made herself go to the front door and open it a crack.
There stood Emma and Bethy. Emma held a large shopping bag in one hand and balanced a tray loaded with fruit skewers in the other. Bethy carried a second large shopping bag, as well as an enormous bunch of pink balloons that looked ready to carry her off in the stiff March breeze.
“We’re here!” Emma announced. “Bethy came early, too, because there was too much for one person to carry.”
Emma’s mother waved from the car and drove away.
There was no turning back now.
“Come in,” Nora said.
What else could she say? If her mother was really set on canceling the party, let her be the one to do it.
Emma’s eyes darted around the crowded living room. “Where is she? Where’s Nellie? Oh, Bethy, look! There’s her stroller!”
“And her car seat!”
“And her little bouncy thingie!”
“And her swing!”
“She’s asleep,” Nora said in a low voice, hoping Nellie could sleep with all of Emma and Bethy’s squealing.
Nora’s mother appeared in the doorway that led from the living room into the kitchen.
“Girls, I don’t think—”
“We’re here to set up!” Emma proclaimed, not seeming to notice either Nora’s mother’s pj’s or her frown. “Bethy’s going to tie a few of the balloons onto the mailbox. Nothing says party-party-party like balloons on the mailbox, don’t you think? Let’s tie one on her swing, too, and one on the stroller— on all of her super-adorable things. Bethy said we got too many balloons, but I don’t think you can have too many balloons, do you?”
Nora’s mother opened her mouth and shut it again.
That could be a science-fair question right there: How could one ten-year-old girl transform a world-famous expert on the rings of Saturn into a gaping goldfish?
“Where should we put the food?” Emma asked. “In the kitchen? Nora, wait till you see the cookies. They’re not just pink-frosted cookies; they’re pink-frosted tulip cookies! And we’ll need a spot to put the presents.”
“The kitchen is fine,” Nora’s mother managed to say.
“Nora, close your eyes,” Emma commanded. “Mrs. Alpers, you close your eyes, too.”
Nora obeyed. She had no idea if her mother had done the same. She could hear Emma fumbling about in one of the shopping bags.
“Okay. You can open them now!”
Emma handed Nora and her mother each a tiny plastic baby bottle, capped with a pink nipple and tied with a pink bow. The bottle was filled with brown powder topped with little white balls.
“The party favors!” Emma beamed. “The brown stuff is hot-chocolate mix. You should have seen how long it took to strain it to get out all the marshmallows so I could put them on the top of each one. Don’t you think they look better with the mini-marshmallows on top?”
Her face alight with excitement, Emma led the way into the kitchen, with Bethy following, still clutching the enormous bunch of pink balloons straining upward toward the ceiling.
Nora’s mother gave Nora a quick, forgiving hug.
“I understand now,” she apologized. “I understand everything.”
When Sarah made her grand entrance to the party an hour later, dressed, hair washed and combed, and carrying a wide-awake, non-crying Nellie, the rapture of the party guests knew no bounds.
“Nellie!” five girls squealed at once, including Amy.
At the sudden noise, Nellie’s small face scrunched itself into pre-crying mode.
“Shush!” Emma instructed the others in a loud whisper. “Use indoor voices!”
Fortunately, Nellie decided not to cry. There was no way she could know that the pink tablecloth, pink balloons, and spread of party food were in her honor. But she did seem to be looking around the room with bright eyes, taking it all in.
“Is it okay if we come closer?” Tamara asked.
Sarah nodded.
“One at a time!” Emma told them, for all the world as if this were her house and Nellie were her niece. But Nora was glad to have someone else taking charge. She herself had no idea what people were supposed to do at a baby-admiration party.
Emma had been nice about the lack of sherbet punch, too. “It’s okay,” she had told Nora. “Once they see Nellie, they won’t care about anything else!” Then Nora had worried that Sarah might refuse to appear with Nellie. What kind of baby-admiration party would that be, with no sherbet punch and no baby? Or Nellie might cry the whole time. But here was Sarah, and here was Nellie, and no one was crying. Yet.
The girls filed past Nellie.
“Look at her fingers!”
“They’re so itty-bitty!”
“I love her booties!”
“That is the cutest dress ever!”
“Her eyes are so blue!”
“They probably won’t stay blue,” Sarah said. “Most Caucasian—white—babies are born with blue eyes, but only a fifth of them have blue eyes later on.”
Now, that was another fascinating fact for her notebook, Nora thought. Why would that be? What could cause infant eyes to change color?
She was oddly relieved to find out that babies could change their eye color. If even eye color wasn’t fixed at birth, maybe other things about babies could change, too, like personality. Maybe Brody could have grown up to be grumpy, and Mason could have grown up to be cheerful.
Despite Emma’s command, all the girls, Emma included, were now crowded around Nellie, who was still snuggled safe in Sarah’s arms. Only Nora stood apart. She could see Nellie anytime she wanted. Plus lots of times she didn’t want.
“Do you think…?” Amy asked then.
“You don’t suppose…?” Elise tried to help her out.
“Would it be all right?” Tamara asked.
“If we were really careful?” Bethy put in.
“Could we hold her?” Emma finished.
Sarah hesitated. But then she smiled. “Nobody has a cold, right? Not even a sniffle?”
Everyone shook her head.
“Okay. Go wash your hands with plenty of soap and hot water. I’ll sit on the couch in the family room, and you can come sit next to me and take turns holding her.”
Great was the excitement as the girls hurried to the kitchen and took turns squirting their hands with soap and scrubbing them under hot water. Nora filed into the kitchen with them but held back to let the others have the first turn at the sink. She didn’t really need a turn, as the last thing she planned on doing was holding Nellie in front of a large, fascinated audience. But as the others raced back to the room, Nora, not to be left out, gave her hands a quick dousing.
She returned to the family room just as Sarah was finishing with giving her baby-holding instructions. It was almost comical, in Nora’s opinion, how much of a fuss Sarah was making about simply holding a baby. Human beings had held human infants ever since humankind had existed. And before that, grown-up apes had held baby apes without washing their hands with hot soapy water and memorizing an instruction manual.
“All right, girls,” Sarah said. “Who wants to go first?”
All of a sudden, the girls turned shy, as if no one, not even Emma, felt she merited the honor of being the very first one to hold Nellie.
“Nora, you’re her aunt,” Emma said. “You can show us how.”
“I don’t think…” Nora had planned to say that she didn’t think people needed an official baby-holding demonstration. And they certainly didn’t need one from someone who had never yet held a baby herself.
But with five pairs of expectant eyes upon her, Nora somehow found herself sitting on the couch next to Sarah,
trying to look more confident than she felt, which meant trying to look confident at all.
Sarah handed Nora the baby. As Nora awkwardly attempted to settle Nellie on her lap, the baby’s surprisingly large head lurched to one side.
“Nora!” Sarah cried out. “Weren’t you listening? You have to support her head! Her neck muscles aren’t strong enough yet! If you don’t support her neck, it can break!”
At this, Nellie began to cry. Surely her neck wasn’t already broken! Surely she had just been awakened by Sarah’s near shriek.
Sarah scooped a wailing Nellie back into her own arms and cradled her close as Nora jumped up from the couch and stood as far away as possible from Nellie on the other side of the room.
The other girls, except for Amy, stared at Nora with apparent disapproval in their eyes, as if she had almost broken Nellie’s neck on purpose instead of merely being a clumsy young aunt who had happened to be out of the room at the wrong time.
There was a pained silence, except for Nellie’s whimpers. No one else seemed to want to be the next one to run the risk of breaking Nellie.
Some party this was turning out to be!
Finally Emma plopped herself down in Nora’s abandoned spot. Unlike Nora, Emma made sure to place a careful hand on the back of Nellie’s neck. Unlike Nora, Emma lit up with pleasure as Nellie grasped her pinkie finger.
“She likes me!” Emma said. “Look! She’s holding on to my finger! Yes, Nellie-Bellie, this is your auntie Emma, yes, it is!”
“Ohhh!” the girls chorused. “Awww!”
In turn, Nellie was held, neck properly supported, by Auntie Bethy, Auntie Elise, Auntie Tamara, and Auntie Amy.
“Maybe I won’t be a veterinarian,” Amy announced as she let Sarah reclaim Nellie. “Maybe I’ll be a pediatrician!”
The only one who had failed at being an aunt was the only one who was Nellie’s real aunt: Aunt Nora.
“Presents?” Sarah asked, once the cookies and fruit skewers had been devoured. No one had complained at all about the pitcher of ice water Nora’s mother had brought out.
“See?” Emma whispered to Nora. “I told you nobody would mind about the sherbet punch.”
Sarah stared in puzzlement at the first of the five beautifully wrapped boxes Emma was holding out to her.
“Oh, girls, you didn’t need to bring us anything,” Nora’s mother said. “The balloons, the cookies, the lovely fruit—it’s already too much.”
“We wanted to,” Emma said. “Truly we did. We all think Nora is sooooo lucky.”
Nora had never in her life felt less lucky. Why did babies have to be so complicated! So fragile and noisy and unpredictable! So utterly unlike ants.
Sarah set Nellie in her little bouncer and sat down in the rocking chair beside her. One by one, she opened the presents.
A little sleeper patterned with pink elephants.
A soft pink blanket with a pink giraffe embroidered on it.
A tiny pink sweater covered with yellow flowers with pink centers.
A stuffed pink unicorn.
A baby-sized T-shirt that said PINK PRINCESS.
Sarah exclaimed over all of them as Nora’s mother wrote down each gift and the name of its giver so that Sarah could send thank-you notes.
Presumably to be written on pink note cards.
Still stinging from her all-too-public aunt failure, Nora felt herself becoming more and more irritated. Did every single thing Nellie owned have to be pink? What was wrong with a gray elephant, the color elephants were in nature? What was wrong with a brown-and-tan giraffe, the colors giraffes were in nature? Surely Amy, who had given the giraffe blanket, knew better than that. And a unicorn? A totally imaginary creature that didn’t exist in nature at all? And why assume that every girl wanted to be a princess, let alone a pink princess?
Nora certainly didn’t.
Except for Emma, who stayed to help clean up, the other girls were collected by their parents at three-thirty.
Nellie had finally started wailing.
“Because she doesn’t want her party to be over,” Emma explained.
Nora wished the party had never begun.
Sarah had carried Nellie upstairs to nurse. Nora’s mother had disappeared into her home office. Her father, who was at the university, had missed the whole thing, which Nora knew he wouldn’t mind a bit.
Emma covered the leftover fruit skewers with plastic wrap and put them in Nora’s fridge. She was certainly comfortable in somebody else’s kitchen.
“Well, that was a perfect party,” Emma said, with a happy sigh.
Emma’s definition of perfect couldn’t have been more different from Nora’s.
“So,” Nora said, eager to change the subject, “what time should I come over tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?” Emma asked, as if she had no idea what Nora was talking about.
“The science fair? The curling irons? Temperature settings, barrel size, ceramic versus metal?”
A shadow passed over Emma’s previously smiling face. The girl who had been so capable in organizing a baby party, cleaning up after a baby party, and holding the baby herself during the baby party now looked strangely ill at ease.
“Nora, there’s, well, there’s a teensy problem.”
“What kind of problem?”
“It’s my parents. They’re being totally ridiculous. I mean, I told them and told them and told them about how we need the curling irons for the science fair, and we need them this weekend, but my dad rolled his eyes and said, ‘Three hundred dollars? You’ve got to be kidding,’ and my mom said, ‘What about that science-fair project where you make a volcano out of vinegar and baking soda?’ ”
Nora stared at Emma, unable to believe what she was hearing.
“I’m sorry, I really am,” Emma said. “But they said no to the curling irons, and I couldn’t talk them into it, and you know how good I am at talking people into things.”
Nora knew all too well that Emma had talked her into another complete disaster.
“So exactly when were you going to get around to telling me?” Nora asked in as icy a tone as she could manage, given the rage that was boiling up in her.
“I didn’t want to spoil the party,” Emma said in a small voice.
“I didn’t want to have the party,” Nora burst out. “But you came barging in with pink everything, and Sarah’s still mad at me about it, I know she is.” Sarah wouldn’t have yelled at Nora in front of everyone if she hadn’t already been angry about having the party sprung on her with minutes to spare. “And you’re the one who wanted me to do my science-fair project on the best way to curl your hair, and now it’s ruined, and the science fair is less than a week away, and we have nothing, nothing at all, except a house full of…pinkness. I. Hate. Pink!”
Even as she said it, she realized what an un-Nora-like thing it was to say. How could you hate a color? It made no sense to have such a strong emotional reaction to a certain wavelength of light! But it was all too much, this whole terrible day.
“We’ll think of something else,” Emma said soothingly. “And the party was wonderful. And Nellie looks adorable in pink, she really does.”
It was easier for Nora to focus her anger on the color pink rather than on her failure as an aunt or her smashed-to-smithereens science-fair dreams. “Why does everyone have to give baby girls pink things?” Nora demanded. “Who decided that girls have to have everything pink, and boys have to have everything blue?”
“I don’t know,” Emma said, calmly wiping up cookie crumbs from the dining room table as if her bombshell announcement hadn’t just destroyed Nora’s life. “I don’t think anybody decided that. Pink just looks girlish, and blue looks boyish. I feel pretty when I wear pink. And other people look at me different when I dress up like a girl.”
“But that’s dumb!” Nora protested. “Why should clothes make a person feel different? Why should clothes make other people react that way?”
“They just do.”<
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“Clothes don’t make me feel different when I wear them,” Nora said. “Unless they’re really uncomfortable or something. And I don’t treat other people differently because of the clothes they wear.”
“Well,” Emma said. It was obvious she was trying to be tactful in what she said next. “You’re different from most people, Nora. You are. And I bet you would feel different if you were wearing pink. Do you ever wear pink?”
“No,” Nora admitted. She had never put her thoughts about clothing in general and pink clothing in particular to a scientific test.
“I have an idea,” Emma said slowly. “You’re the one who likes experiments. So for all next week, you should wear something pink every day.”
“I don’t have anything pink.”
“You can borrow one of my pink sweaters. Like this one.”
Emma pulled her pink sweater out of her bag, and handed it to Nora.
“Wear a different pink sweater every single day; I have tons I can loan you. And see how you feel and how other people treat you.”
“And what about you? What will you wear?”
Nora could tell that Emma hadn’t expected she would be part of the experiment.
“I’ll go upstairs and get you some of my non-pink sweaters,” Nora said, glad to see that Emma was starting to look nervous, too. “And you can see how you feel and how other people act toward you.”
Then Emma’s face brightened.
“This can be—”
No. Emma couldn’t be serious.
“—our science-fair project!” Emma concluded.
“We can’t do a science-fair project on how people feel about the color pink!”
“Why not? Remember the project in Coach Joe’s book about how people feel about different kinds of animals?”
The one that Nora had already rejected as hopelessly dumb?
“Look,” Emma said. “To make it more scientific, we’ll take a survey in class at the end of the week to see what people noticed. Surveys are scientific. You can make graphs about the results. Graphs are scientific. And we can keep a journal of our feelings. That’s sort of scientific.”
The Nora Notebooks, Book 2 Page 6