by Ellis Weiner
No small bargain (3,4).
The answer to this cryptic clue, then, called for one word of three letters and one word of four. Abigail realized that the words “no small” had a total of seven letters, as did the answer. Surely this could not be a coincidence. So she spent fifteen minutes recombining the letters in “no small” into three- and four-letter words. But none of the results (LAM SLON; SAM NOLL; LAS MOLN; etc.) made sense. So she did something she never did.
She gave up. She put the puzzle away and read a book.
In doing so, she made use of one of her father’s inventions: the Leg-Mounted Centrally Hinged Book Holder with Gooseneck Light Source (or, as the Professor sometimes called it, the LMCHBHWGLS). This device was intended to solve one of the problems encountered when reading in bed—namely, when holding a book with two hands, it is difficult (if not impossible) to make use of either hand for such desirable activities as manipulating a cup of hot chocolate, twirling your hair, scratching your dog or cat, etc.
The LMCHBHWGLS solved this problem in an ingenious fashion. Abigail sat on her bed with her back against the headboard and her legs out straight, as one does when reading in bed. Then she attached the two leg clamps of the device onto her legs. Connected to them were two arms that reached up to her book and held it in her lap with two rubber-tipped graspers. Also attached to the leg pieces was a reading lamp affixed (“affixed” means the same thing as “attached.” Don’t ask me why.) to a long, flexible neck that she could bend in any direction.
Thus—and you cannot but be impressed by this fact—Abigail was able to read in bed while, at the same time, eating chips and dip with one hand and sipping from a cup of terrible limeade with the other, pausing in these activities only to turn a page.
About two hours later, Abigail and John came downstairs for dinner and beheld their father standing in the hallway, holding the telephone and frowning.
“That’s odd,” he said. “The phone rang about two hours ago, but when I answered a strange voice said, ‘Professor Elton Templeton?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ and they said, ‘Please hold for an important message.’ So I held, but I heard nothing. There was no music, no recording—it was just silence. Finally I hung up. Now I just discovered that there’s a message on voicemail. And that message was left at exactly the same time I was waiting on the phone and hearing nothing.”
Abigail shrugged. “It must be a coincidence. Both calls came at exactly the same time.”
“What was the message?” John said.
“Well, that’s another odd thing,” their father said. “Listen.” He called the voicemail number and switched the phone to its speaker. A prerecorded voice said, “-essage received . . . unday . . . at four-erty-seven pee em.” Then a man’s voice said, very quickly, “Professor! Steve Stevenson. I have some thoughts about the spotlight problem.” There was the loud click sound of a caller hanging up.
“Huh,” John said. “Him again.”
“Yes,” the Professor said. “And once again he doesn’t leave any number where I can call him back. And there is no spotlight problem.” He went on to explain that he assumed the caller was talking about the close-up device the Professor was developing. In his earlier notes to himself, the Professor had indeed written about possible problems that would arise if the performer in the close-up were being lit by a normal spotlight. “But I solved that,” he said. “It hasn’t been a problem for weeks.”
“Well,” John said, “when it was a problem, who did you discuss it with?”
Abigail added, “That person might have told Steve Stevenson about it, and he doesn’t know you’ve solved it.” the Professor said. “I have never discussed it with anyone. It wasn’t ever that big a problem to begin with.”
But that’s the mystery,
All three Templetons stood there silently, looking down at the telephone as though waiting for it to take the hint and explain to them what this all meant. It failed to do so. Eventually the Professor sighed, shook his head, and walked off toward the kitchen to make dinner.
John and Abigail looked at each other.
“I don’t like this,” Abigail said.
“Something’s not right,” John agreed.
This, in effect, was Templeton Twin-ese for “Let’s keep an eye on this and, when the time comes, figure it out.”
Abigail went back to her room and decided to give the cryptic one more try. She read the clue again (“No small bargain [3,4]”), looked at the grid , and immediately knew the answer.15
“HA!” she cried.
By walking away and coming back later, she was able to approach the problem from a different angle. Otherwise, she just would have been stuck with ALL SNOM and SON MALL and MNS LOLA forever.
This, too, will have important consequences as our story progresses.
FOR FURTHER STUDY
When the Narrator describes a certain cymbal as making “a big, crashy sound,” do you feel he is talking to you as if you were a big baby?
Write and perform a one-act play titled The Narrator Is Right to Treat Us as Though We Were a Bunch of Big Babies, Because That Is What We Are.
Solve this cryptic: Grant, she ate our raisin! (Crazy! But a true statement about an important person.) (3,8,2,1,6)*
* Rearrange the letters in “Grant, she ate our raisin!” The answer is THE NARRATOR IS A GENIUS, which is, of course, a true statement about an important person.
13. (Note: We may as well all admit that when I say things like “previously” or “earlier” or “once before,” I will be referring to things that happened in the first book. You may think, “That’s not fair! What if I haven’t read the first book?” But whose fault is that? Hint: It’s your fault.)
14. I will save us all some time and put the answer here. The answer was DALLAS. It is a city in Texas. Now, before you throw this book across the room and declare that this is an outrage and an insult to cryptics, here is the explanation of the clue: It is a capital (and not a lowercase) D. It is, therefore, a big D. And “Big D” is a somewhat well-known nickname for Dallas. Of course, Abigail had never heard Dallas referred to as “Big D” before. No wonder she was cranky. You are probably cranky, too. Well, I’m sorry (to an extent).
15. It had nothing to do with the number of letters in “no small.” Rather, the first word had three letters. What three-letter word meant “no small”? BIG. What is a four-letter word for “bargain”? DEAL. The answer was BIG DEAL.
On the following afternoon the twins arrived home from school about ten minutes before Manny Mann was due to arrive. After quieting and calming the deliriously barking and wagging and being-ridiculous Cassie, they began discussing something that people their age—and possibly your age, too—seem to think is terribly, terribly important: what snack to make. Just as they had decided, and were going into the kitchen to begin assembling it, the doorbell rang, and there stood Manny Mann.
He was wearing a yellow T-shirt with the words ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?, black jeans, and black socks and shoes. The first thing he said, after John and Abigail had quieted Cassie (who had been barking in a loud and unhelpful manner), was, “Hey! Are you guys ready to have fun?”
“Um, I don’t know,” John said. “We have homework to do. But we’re going to have a snack first.”
“Would you like some?” Abigail asked.
“Sure!” the young man said. “Snacks are fun!”
The twins led him into the kitchen, where he immediately noticed an unusual device lying on a plate, surrounded by the ingredients for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “Hey! Whoa! Hold everything!” Manny Mann said. “What’s that?”
It was the Professor’s Point-Hinged Twin-Bladed Condiment Spreader—a.k.a. the PHTBCS. (You pronounce this—if you must pronounce it at all—as “FIT-BIKS.”)
This item resembled a big pair of scissors. But instead of sharp, cutting metal blades, it used two soft, flexible rubbery blades, like a pair of wide windshield wipers. These were mounted on handles. You placed two sl
ices of bread side by side. Then you dipped one blade of the PHTBCS in the peanut butter, and the other in the jelly. You placed the peanut-butter-laden blade on one piece of bread and the jelly-laden blade on the other and closed your hand as though cutting something with the “scissors.” The result: You spread both preparations on both pieces of bread in a single motion.
Manny Mann watched in delighted amazement as Abigail expertly manipulated the PHTBCS.
“Our father invented it,” John said.
“THIS IS THE GREATEST THING THAT WAS EVER INVENTED!” Manny Mann proclaimed.
“He’s invented better things than this,” Abigail said. “But thank you.”
John poured three glasses of lemonade (I know. It sounds repulsive. With such a snack I would drink milk. But what do you expect? They’re children.), and the three of them sat around the kitchen table, eating their perfectly sensible snack and drinking their terribly inappropriate lemonade. Cassie, as usual, sat at Abigail’s feet and stared with unblinking intensity at whatever Abigail put into her mouth.
Suddenly Manny Mann said, “Hey! I have a great idea! Let’s open a lemonade stand and sell each glass for a bagful of gold! Won’t that be fun?”
John said, “I don’t think anyone would buy a glass of lemonade for a bagful of gold.”
“But what if it’s really good?” Manny said.
“Still,” Abigail said. “That’s too much. Besides, we have homework to do.”
Manny looked disappointed and said, “Oh, all right.” He grew silent again for about fifteen seconds. Suddenly he said, “Hey, I have a better idea. Let’s go bowling and wear funny hats!”
“We can’t,” John said. “We really have to do our homework.”
“But it’ll be fun! Don’t kids like to have fun?” Manny looked frustrated and frowned. He thought hard for a few seconds. All at once a look of great wisdom and intelligence took over his face. “Okay. Seriously. Here it is. Are you ready?” He paused dramatically. “We build a model of the Eiffel Tower out of jelly beans.”
“Manny,” Abigail said. “These are all great ideas—”
“I know! They’re fun!”
“—but we have to do our homework.”
“But that’s not fun,” Manny protested. “Look, what’s more fun—having fun, or not having fun?”
Abigail said, “We’ll have fun later.” She stood up. “If you want to help, you can wash the dishes.”
“I’ll do the dishes,” John said, also rising and collecting the plates.
“Okay, fine,” the nanny said in a grousing manner, and slumped back in his chair and sulked.
“Well, okay, here’s one fun thing,” Abigail said. “We taught Cassie a new trick. Come on, John, let’s show him.”
John put the plates down and stood behind Abigail. All at once she backed into him so that his arms were sticking out on either side of her, as though he were taking her captive. She said in an exaggerated, fake-distressed voice, “Help! Cassie! He’s got me prisoner! I can’t get away!”
Cassie immediately went into a crouch and stared at John with squinty eyes. She started growling. Abigail then said, “Good girl!” and moved away from John, grabbed a little dog biscuit from a bowl, and gave it to the delighted animal.
“Isn’t that neat?” John said.
“It’s okay,” Manny shrugged. “But it’s not really fun. I had no idea you guys were so serious.”
And he left the twins alone for the rest of the afternoon.
The next day Manny was right on time. But when the twins opened the door to his knock, they were astonished to see that his entire style of dress was different: He was wearing a crisp, unwrinkled pair of tan slacks, a white dress shirt, a navy-blue blazer, and a dark-red tie. As he entered the house he said, “I’m here to be serious. First, I think we should start off by ironing our socks.”
Abigail—quite reasonably—said, “Huh?”
“No, wait,” Manny said. “I can think of something more serious than that.”
“Ironing your shoes?” John said.
“Don’t be silly,” Manny said. “Vacuuming the walls. Let’s do that. Let’s vacuum the walls and make this house really clean.”
“That’s not serious,” Abigail said. “That’s just . . . weird.”
“Okay,” Manny shrugged. “I have plenty more ideas.” The nanny thought for a second, then said, “Hmmm . . . what’s a serious food? Broccoli! No, it’s green, and green is a fun color. Cauliflower! It’s white, which is really serious. Okay. Let’s—”
“Manny—”
“—open up a cauliflower stand, and sell bunches of cauliflower for a bagful of gold.”
The twins took Manny into the kitchen, where they had made pretend pizzas from English muffins, spaghetti sauce, and cheese. They all sat down and started eating this adorable snack along with glasses of some hideous bright-red fruit punch that practically glowed in the dark. Finally Abigail said, “Manny, you’re a student here at the Academy, right?”
“Yeah,” Manny said. “I just started.”
“Then don’t you have homework to do? Books to read and assignments to write and projects and stuff?”
“I guess . . .”
“Then how come you don’t do them?”
Manny hesitated. Then, from an inside pocket of his jacket, he produced a big plastic eyeglass case. He opened it and took out the biggest pair of glasses the Templeton twins had ever seen. They were big, not because the frames were oversized and comically enormous like a clown would wear, but because their lenses were so thick. He put them on. The lenses magnified his eyes and made them look like the oversized eyes of an owl in a cartoon.
“Watch,” he said. Manny looked down at his snack plate. Immediately the glasses slid off his face and fell with a clatter onto the plate.
“Can you make the frames squeeze your head tighter?” John asked. “Or keep them in place with one of those straps around the back of your head, like athletes have?”
“I tried that,” Manny said. He put the glasses back on. “But the frames can’t get any tighter, and the straps dig into my head and pinch my hair. So I’ve sort of stopped reading. And doing homework.” He trailed off and screwed up his face and suddenly and explosively sneezed. The glasses shot off his nose, bounced off his hands, and landed on the floor. “Plus, they come off when I sneeze.” He bent down, picked them up, and put them back in their case. “Anyway, don’t worry about it.” From his inner pocket he pulled out a sheet of paper. “I wrote down a ton of serious ideas last night. It’s kind of messy, though, because I wasn’t wearing my glasses—”
“I have an idea,” Abigail said. “You give us the list. We’ll talk about it tonight, and tomorrow we’ll tell you which of the things we want to do.”
“Great!” Manny looked hopeful and pleased. “But what should I do the rest of today?”
“Hold your glasses on, and read,” suggested John. “Or listen to music. Or take a nap.”
Manny said, “Hey, I know! I’ll write down some new ideas.”
That night the Templeton twins held an emergency conference in Abigail’s room. They began by agreeing that something had to be done. Unless they found some activity to occupy Nanny Manny while he was in their house, he would interrupt and distract and bother the twins every day with suggestions of “fun” things that they didn’t have time to do, or “serious” things that were out of the question.
“We have to fix his glasses,” John said.
FOR FURTHER STUDY
Fill in the blanks: The only occasion on which I would pay a bagful of gold for a glass of lemonade is if I were lucky enough to have the opportunity to buy it for the N_ _ _ _ _ _ _.
Write an award-winning screenplay for a blockbuster motion picture on the topic Cauliflower: King of the Serious Vegetables.
Answer Yes, No, or Please Repeat the Question: Is the horrible bright-red drink the twins had with their snack called “fruit punch” because a lot of innocent fruits were pu
nched in order to make it?
YNPRTQ
John grabbed a long yellow pad of paper and Abigail grabbed a couple of pencils. (You will not be surprised to learn that she kept a large number of pencils in her room.) John started sketching a crude figure of a person, consisting of his head, neck, and shoulders. Around the figure’s head John drew something that looked like a little cage, held up by little legs that rested on the figure’s shoulders. Attached to the cage he drew a pair of glasses.
Abigail studied John’s work over his shoulder. She murmured, “I like it.” Then she thought for a minute. “But when he turns his head, the glasses will stay where they are and won’t be in front of his eyes anymore. Can you make it so the glasses turn with him?”
John stared at the drawing. Then he smiled. “Oh! Sure!” He added four little zigzaggy vertical lines at the places where the cage part connected to the shoulder mounts. “Springs. The whole thing sits on little springs, which would let him turn his head.”
“But that means it has to be attached to his head.”
John drew a round piece like a sweatband. It circled the figure’s forehead and connected it to the cage part. “There. Now when he turns his head, the whole thing will turn with him.”
Abigail’s eyes grew wide. “I think this will work.”
And John said the thing he always said when he had an idea and wanted to try it out. “Let’s do it and view it!”16
I know you are very busy and have many important things to think about—or at least you think they’re important—so I won’t bother you with a description of how John and Abigail ran down into the basement, where their father’s invention workshop was waiting to be unpacked and set up. I won’t attempt to take up valuable space in your thoughts with an account of how they opened various boxes and crates, and acquired a collection of strips and rods and bands of metal, and the nuts and bolts needed to connect them, and an array of various springs. If they cleverly decided to cement lengths of foam rubber to the underside of the shoulder pieces (for comfort), and so had to find the rubber and the glue, you won’t hear it from me. Of the tools they would need to assemble these pieces (screwdrivers, pliers, clamps, clips, etc.), I will say nothing.