Mitch and Amy

by Beverly Cleary

  “’Bye, Mom!” Mitchell yelled, and ran out the back door in his new jeans, size nine slim.

  Amy left for school shortly after Mitchell had disappeared into the fog. She was too happy and excited to wait any longer, but instead of running as if she had springs in the soles of her sneakers, she walked sedately, enjoying the feel of her new skirt brushing against the back of her knees and secretly hoping that people would think, There goes a girl who is one decade old. Marla joined her, and she too walked sedately in her new pleated skirt. They acted very grown-up to the traffic boy, who led them across the street nearest to the school.

  Familiar old Bay View School sat solidly in the midst of uproar and confusion. During the summer, construction of a new wing had started and concrete mixers rattled and growled at one end of the building. Temporary wooden classrooms covered half the playground, which swarmed with screaming, yelling boys and girls, most of them wearing new school clothes and all of them excited at seeing old friends. Amy glanced quickly around and located Mitchell playing kickball at one end of the playground and Alan Hibbler running through a second-grade girls’ hopscotch game at the other.

  Still trying to behave like ten-year-olds, Amy and Marla climbed the steps of the temporary wooden building that was to be Mrs. Martin’s classroom until the new wing was completed. “It’s like going to an old-fashioned school,” remarked Amy, who had attended the third grade in the main building.

  “I know,” agreed Marla. “I feel sort of like Laura in the Little House books.”

  “We’ve walked miles across the prairie,” said Amy.

  Marla took up the game. “With our scarves over the lower part of our faces to keep our noses from freezing.”

  Amy objected. “Not on the first day of school, silly. Nobody’s nose ever froze on the first day of school.”

  “I guess you’re right,” said Marla. “Leave out the scarves. Make it with our lunches in baskets instead. And sunbonnets on our heads.”

  Amy soon discovered there was nothing old-fashioned about the inside of the temporary classroom. Boys and girls were crowding around a lot of new equipment—a television set, a tape recorder, a record player, a slide projector, and a screen.

  “Hey! TV at school!” said Mike Melnick, who had followed the girls up the steps.

  “Hi, Amy! Did you know we were going to have TV in school?” asked Bonnie Puckett, who was Amy’s next-to-best friend.

  “Mrs. Martin will never let us watch anything good,” Marla reminded them. “Just educational programs and stuff like that.”

  “These are our audio-visual aids,” Mrs. Martin explained, after her new class had saluted the flag. “Audio means to hear and visual means to see. Our audio-visual aids will help us to learn with our ears and our eyes.” To demonstrate one of the ways in which the new equipment could be used, she put a record on the phonograph, and the class heard someone playing America the Beautiful on the piano to accompany their morning song.

  Amy enjoyed singing to the record, and from the temporary building next door she could hear Mitchell’s room singing to their recording of America the Beautiful. She decided that audio-visual aids might be fun in spite of being educational. She knew that Mitchell would think so, because he liked anything that could be plugged in and turned on.

  Amy was even more pleased with the audio-visual aids as the day went on. When class elections were held and all the hands were counted, Amy was elected vice-president. She looked modestly at her hands in her lap while Mrs. Martin explained that it was the duty of the vice-president to play the record of America the Beautiful each morning after the president led the flag salute. Amy was proud of her new responsibility. In the third grade the class vice-president just sat around waiting for the president to get sick.

  “Lucky!” whispered Marla from across the aisle.

  Amy’s pleasure lasted until arithmetic, which was a review of multiplication facts. Mrs. Martin hinted at a test in the near future.

  “Ee-yew, a test,” said Amy, as she and Marla lined up to go to the cafetorium for lunch.

  “Multiplication, icky,” agreed Marla. “Ee-yew” and “icky” were popular expressions of dislike with fourth-grade girls.

  That evening at dinner Amy started to tell about all the new audio-visual aids when Mitchell interrupted. “Guess what?” he said. “Miss Colby didn’t tell us what to do in arithmetic. She turned on the tape recorder, and her voice told us what to do.”

  “Mitchell,” said Amy sternly. “I was talking.”

  “Well, she did,” said Mitchell. “And when the cement trucks and the workmen made too much noise we got to recite into a microphone. Or we did until the class in the building next door plugged in their slide projector and blew a fuse. After that we just shouted above the noise.”

  “Mom. Dad—” protested Amy, eager to tell about her audio-visual aids before Mitchell told everything.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Mitchell, speaking into a fork as if it were a microphone. “This is your friendly neighborhood fourth grader. Six times six is thirty-six. Six times seven is forty-two.”

  That Mitchell, thought Amy, amused in spite of herself at her brother’s performance. He could be so exasperating, bringing multiplication into the conversation purposely to annoy her.

  “Mitchell,” said Mr. Huff. “Amy was speaking.”

  With a triumphant look at Mitchell, Amy told about her duty as vice-president. “And we’re going to get to watch TV, too,” she said. When she saw that her parents did not share her enthusiasm, she added hastily, “Of course, it will be educational.”

  “Our teacher is going to give us a test on multiplication facts to help decide which arithmetic group we belong in,” announced Mitchell.

  Amy braced herself, knowing Mitchell must feel this way when she told what page she was on while he was reading aloud.

  “What about your class, Amy?” asked her father. “Aren’t you going to have an arithmetic test, too?”

  “Ee-yew,” answered Amy, wrinkling her nose.

  “That hardly answers the question.”

  “Well, yes,” admitted Amy.

  “Seven times four,” her father shot at her. He was an accountant who was probably born knowing his multiplication tables.

  “Twenty-eight,” Mitchell answered promptly.

  “Twenty-eight,” echoed Amy, relieved that her brother had supplied the answer for her.

  “Mitchell, let Amy answer. Five times nine.”

  “Um. Um—” Amy was trying to think.

  “Everybody knows fives,” said Mitchell.

  “Five times nine is—um—forty-six. No, forty-five.” Amy hoped her father would forget about multiplication now.

  “Amy, I think that we had better go over your tables this evening. You practice your cello while I do the dishes, and then I’ll help you,” said Mrs. Huff. “And Mitchell, you had better read aloud for a little while.”

  Mitchell groaned. “Do I gotta?”

  “Yes, you gotta,” answered his mother, and Mitchell groaned again.

  Amy sat through the rest of the meal positively hating the multiplication tables. She was not like Mitchell, who might squirm and dawdle and think up interruptions, but would eventually do the things he did not want to do. When Amy did not want to do something, she did not want to do it one hundred percent. She simply did not want to learn her multiplication tables. They were so boring, as boring as visiting the post office with her old Brownie troop or having to sit quietly while grown-ups talked politics. Oh, she understood about multiplication all right. She had made graphs and done all the things that were supposed to make third graders understand the reasons for multiplication, but when she came to sitting down and memorizing them, Amy balked. Ask Amy three times four, and she would rather write down imaginary fours three times and add them up in her head than memorize a lot of boring old tables. Mitchell’s popping out with the right answer ahead of her didn’t help either. “Twelve!” Mitchell would say while A
my was still writing imaginary fours on an imaginary blackboard with imaginary chalk.

  By skillful management Amy managed to avoid reviewing the multiplication tables that evening. She set the timer on the kitchen clock to mark the half hour that she and Mitchell must practice their music. Then she played her cello with unusual diligence. When Mitchell struggled to blow the right notes of The Red River Valley on his French horn, she did not yield to the temptation to play the tune correctly on her cello. Nothing made Mitchell madder than having Amy play correctly by ear the music he was trying to play by note. As he so often reminded her, the French horn was the most difficult of the brass instruments.

  When the timer ping-ping-pinged at the end of the half hour, Amy let Mitchell beat her into the kitchen to turn it off and instead skipped into the bathroom to take a bath without being told.

  Amy spent a long time in the bathtub while out in the living room she could hear Mitchell plodding along with the story about Jeff and his pony. She lay back and was glad she was not out there trying to add up an imaginary column of six eights while her mother said, “Think, Amy.” Her mother always confused her by saying, “Think, Amy,” when she was halfway up the imaginary column, and then she had to start over again.

  “Amy, what are you doing in there?” Mrs. Huff called through the bathroom door.

  “Taking a bath,” answered Amy virtuously.

  “Well, hurry up about it,” said her mother.

  After her bath Amy brushed her teeth with careful up-and-down strokes while she ran the water so hard she could not hear her mother tell her to hurry. After that she had to fasten a dental rubber band to the retainer she was wearing to straighten her teeth. With one thing and another the evening slipped by. Then it was bedtime, and there was no time for multiplication tables.

  “You know, Amy,” said Mrs. Huff, when she had kissed her daughter good night, “you’re never going to learn your multiplication tables until you really want to learn them. There is nothing I can do to help until you decide to learn them.”

  “Mm-hm,” murmured Amy sleepily. Nothing would ever make her want to learn her multiplication tables. Nothing.

  Somehow, there was no time for multiplication in the morning either. In the midst of breakfast Mitchell remembered he was supposed to take some money to school for insurance in case he was injured during school hours while he was in the fourth grade. Amy said she was supposed to take insurance money, too, and there was confusion while Mrs. Huff wrote checks and Amy and her brother found the forms to be filled out. When school insurance was taken care of, Amy suddenly remembered she needed an old peanut-butter jar to use in a science experiment—the class was going to sprout beans in such a way that their growth could be watched through the jars. Then Mitchell reminded his mother that they both needed money to pay for their lunches, which meant a search for the exact change to pay for two lunches so they would not slow up the line in the cafetorium.

  “Good-bye. Have a nice day.” Mrs. Huff sounded a little tired as Amy followed her brother out the back door with her lunch money, check for accident insurance, and the peanut-butter jar. “And after this, please remember things the night before,” she called after them.

  “Sure, Mom,” Mitchell called back, light-footed in his new sneakers.

  “Sure, Mom,” answered Amy, lighthearted because once again she had escaped drill in her multiplication facts. The fall morning was the kind she liked best—patches of sun shining through the morning fog and the pungent smell of damp eucalyptus leaves heavy in the air. Who could care about multiplication on a morning like this one?

  School started happily enough with Amy setting the phonograph needle in the right groove of the America the Beautiful record, but when the class had sung the song and Amy had returned to her seat, Mrs. Martin started passing out paper. “Class, we are going to have our test on multiplication facts the first thing while our minds are fresh.”

  There was a murmur in the classroom. A lot of pupils felt Mrs. Martin was not being fair. Amy had a sinking feeling in her stomach that felt like the sound her cello made when she dragged her bow across the strings.

  “Mrs. Martin, there aren’t any problems on my paper. Just rows of numbers,” someone said.

  Mrs. Martin smiled. “I have a surprise for you. Today a phonograph record is going to give us our problems. The numbers on your papers are the numbers of the problems. You all know enough to put your first answer by number one.”

  This procedure was a surprise to Amy, who had not expected an audio-visual aid to give tests.

  Fog still hung like a gray veil outside the windows of the little wooden building. Mrs. Martin turned on the lights. “When we all have our papers in front of us and our pencils in our hands, I will play a record of a man reading the multiplication problems. Can anyone tell me why we are taking our test this way?”

  “So we get to use our audio-visual aids?” suggested Mike, who was always the first one in the class to speak.

  “So you can do something else while we take the test?” asked Bonnie Puckett.

  Mrs. Martin shook her head. “We’re taking the test from the record, because all the fourth-grade classes are going to take the same test and it is important for all classes to be tested at the same speed. This way one teacher cannot read the problems faster than another teacher.”

  Amy had to admit to herself that this reason sounded fair, but still she did not like the idea. She held her pencil beside the first space on her paper so she would be ready.

  Mrs. Martin set the record on the turntable. “Let me give you a hint,” she said. “If you don’t know an answer, skip it and go on to the next problem.” Then she set the needle in the groove on the record.

  “Are you ready?” asked the phonograph in a man’s voice. His voice was as calm as the voice on the birdcall record. Here was another man who had never hit his sister or cheered at a baseball game.

  “No!” shouted the class.

  The record ignored this response. “Four times six,” it said, sounding so much like the man on Mrs. Huff’s birdcall record that for a moment Amy expected to hear a chirp or a trill. Four times six, four times six, Amy thought frantically. I can do it if you’ll just give me time.

  The record did not care how Amy felt. It was not interested in giving her time. “Three times five,” it said evenly.

  Wait! a voice within Amy cried. I don’t have four times six yet. She could hear Mike Melnick’s pencil scratch on his paper. Mike knew four times six. Mike also knew three times five. Mike was the smartest boy in the class.

  “Five times eight.” The record was not interested in what Mike or Amy or anyone else knew. It had no heart. It isn’t fair, thought Amy rebelliously. The record doesn’t ask anything I can answer fast.

  “Two times two,” said the record.

  Four! thought Amy triumphantly in spite of her dismay that the record seemed to read her thoughts. She managed to write down the answer and think, I got you that time.

  The record, ignoring her turmoil, said, “Six times six.” Before she even had time to think it went on and said, “Four times five.”

  This answer Amy knew, but when she wrote it down she was not sure she wrote it in the right space.

  “Three times nine,” said the machine.

  I hate you, thought Amy, growing more and more panicky. If a real live teacher had been giving the test, she could have raised her hand and asked to have the problem repeated in order to gain time. All around her she heard pencils scratch on paper. Knowing that Marla was able to write down answers hurt, and Amy felt as if Marla were almost disloyal to get ahead of her. “Nine times two.” If only you would stop for a minute so I could catch up, thought Amy. Just one teeny little weeny little minute. That’s all I ask.

  “Seven times four,” said the relentless machine, feeling not the least bit sorry for Amy.

  Seven times four, seven times four. Amy’s thoughts were spinning. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. She had forgotten
all the multiplication facts she had ever known. All she could do was sit and hate the machine for not caring and herself for not knowing the answers.

  Amy gave up. Her eyes filled with tears. Everyone in the class would finish the test but Amy. She would be put in the lowest arithmetic group, and all because of that machine. It wasn’t fair. She never thought an audio-visual aid could treat her this way. The fourth grade had started out so happily, too, in the little building like an old-fashioned school. Well, no pioneer girl in a book ever had to take a test from a machine that would not slow down.

  “Three times four.”

  Oh shut up, thought Amy, blinking away her tears. Her pride was hurt. Now Marla was better than she was in arithmetic. And Mitchell was sure to shine in a test given by a machine, the way he loved things that plugged in and turned on. Amy was left behind.

  Suddenly the lights went out. “Fi-ive—” drawled the machine. Amy looked up from her paper. “—t-ime-ss—se-ev-en-n-n,” the machine dragged the words out, before it died. Amy flopped back in her seat, glad of a moment’s rest.

  “Hooray!” said Mike Melnick right out loud, and the rest of the class laughed.

  “Oh dear. And right in the middle of our test,” said Mrs. Martin.

  Of course, everyone was delighted, and when Mrs. Martin sent Mike into Miss Colby’s room to find out if her lights had gone out too, they learned that in all the temporary buildings the electricity had gone off because Miss Colby had blown a fuse when she had plugged in her slide projector. She had already notified the custodian. Minutes went by and still the lights did not go on. Finally a message arrived saying the custodian was out of fuses and had to drive downtown for a new supply.