“Mom! He’s teasing!” cried Amy.
Amy could hear her mother sigh in the living room before she said, “Mitchell, can’t you find something to do? Read a book or something. I brought you a book from the library yesterday.”
“It isn’t a good book,” said Mitchell, still in the kitchen doorway. “Nothing exciting happens in the first chapter.”
Amy settled the whole thing by giving Mitchell a good hard shove and shutting the door on him.
“Mom,” said Mitchell from the other side of the door. “Amy pushed me.”
“You children!” was all Mrs. Huff said.
The girls resumed their scrubbing. Amy and Marla shared the bathtub of suds and worked in front of the refrigerator while Bonnie tackled the linoleum near the back door. Swish-swish-swish went the scrubbing brushes. Rain beat down on the skylight overhead. Amy found herself growing warm from hot water and exercise, but she was enjoying the companionship of her friends. The brushes worked up a good lather, and Amy had a nice feeling of accomplishment.
“You know Bernadette, that new girl in our patrol?” asked Bonnie above the swishing.
In the living room Mitch made a gagging noise, and Amy found herself growing more and more annoyed with her brother for eavesdropping.
“You know what?” continued Bonnie to the girls. “Bernadette irons her own Scout uniform. That’s why it’s always sort of wrinkled.”
“I’m glad I don’t have to iron my own Scout uniform,” said Marla, just as Amy had decided she would like to try ironing hers. “I think Bernadette is sort of funny peculiar. You know what she brought to school in her lunch one day? Cold enchiladas and a big dill pickle.”
“I know,” said Amy, who was fascinated by Bernadette. “And do you know what she said? She said the dill pickle was for dessert. And she sat there eating it as if it were a big piece of cake or something.”
“And another time she brought some oatmeal cookies that were the most awful blue-green color,” said Marla. “She said she had been experimenting with food coloring.”
“And she didn’t even care when everybody laughed. At least, I don’t think she did,” said Bonnie. “We would have to get her in our patrol at Scouts. She’ll probably bring dill pickles when it’s her turn to bring refreshments.”
“Guess who’s her refreshment partner?” said Amy. “Me!”
“Ee-yew!” cried Marla. “You poor thing!”
At that point Mitchell walked into the kitchen and picked up the telephone. The scrubbing stopped, and the girls sat back on their heels.
Amy threw down her scrubbing brush. “Mitchell Huff! You’re supposed to stay out of here!”
“I just want to use the phone a minute,” Mitchell said, and began to dial.
Assuming that Mitchell was making a telephone call that might lead to his going to a friend’s house, Amy allowed him to stay. The girls’ conversation turned to school and the study of the California Indian, but they did not go back to scrubbing.
“Wasn’t it funny when Mrs. Martin was going to show us how the Indians made acorn mush, and then all her acorns turned out to be wormy?” asked Bonnie, and the girls began to giggle.
Mitchell listened to the telephone a moment. Then he hung up without speaking. Amy looked at him suspiciously. “Who did you telephone?” she demanded.
“The time,” said Mitchell with a grin.
“Mitchell Huff!” yelled Amy, annoyed with her friends for laughing as if her brother had done something unusually clever. “You didn’t have to come in here. You could have looked at the clock!”
“It’s more fun to phone for the time,” answered Mitchell logically.
“Mitch.” Mrs. Huff’s tone was both warning and weary.
Amy rose from her knees and slammed the door behind her brother. The scrubbing brushes began to swish once more. Amy was so annoyed with Mitch that she began to scrub harder and faster with all her strength. She came to a raisin that someone, Mitchell no doubt, had stepped on, and she scraped it up and put it in the garbage. She scrubbed two squares of the asphalt tile at a time before she moved on to the next two squares. The three scrubbing brushes rasped companionably across the floor, when Amy heard her mother say, “Mitchell, will you please find something to do? Something constructive?”
The next thing Amy knew, Mitchell was opening the kitchen door again and her friends had stopped working to see what was going to happen. “Mom!” she shrieked, dropping her brush and skidding through the suds to fling herself against the door to keep her brother from entering. “Keep Mitchell out of here!”
“Mom told me to do something constructive, and I was going to—” Mitchell did not have a chance to finish.
“You don’t have to be constructive in here!” shouted Amy. “Go on someplace else and be constructive. We’ll never get this floor done if you keep interrupting.”
Mitchell became dramatic. “Me! She blames me because she isn’t getting the floor scrubbed! Here I am trying to do something constructive while she and her friends waste their time gossiping—”
Amy shoved on the door and Mitchell shoved back, but Mitchell was stronger and Amy was standing on a soapy floor. Slowly, in spite of all she could do, the door opened. Bonnie and Marla found this struggle between brother and sister funny, but Amy did not. Then she noticed Mitchell staring over her shoulder at the floor.
“How are you going to get rid of all that lather?” Mitchell wanted to know. “You sure must have used high-suds soap.”
The three girls stared at the floor. “Help! We’re surrounded,” said Marla, and began to giggle.
Now that she stopped to look, Amy discovered that Marla and Bonnie really were surrounded. Surrounded by a thick layer of soapy lather. Amy was standing in it, and it almost covered her sneakers.
“How are you going to get out?” asked Mitchell.
“Oh, we’ll rinse it off,” said Amy airily.
“How?” Mitchell, whose mind could be irritatingly logical at times, always wanted to know how things were done.
Bonnie cupped some suds in her hands and blew. A stream of bubbles came frothing out between her fingers. Amy thought she had never seen Marla laugh so hard. Then Marla snatched up a handful of suds and blew bubbles, and Bonnie laughed. One would think they had never seen soap bubbles before.
“What’s so funny in there?” asked Mrs. Huff.
“Mom, you ought to see—” began Mitchell.
“No, Mom! Stay there,” begged Amy. “Mitchell, go away.”
“You’re going to have to get those suds off the floor somehow,” said Mitchell.
“You keep quiet!” yelled Amy, beginning to suspect that her floor-scrubbing party might not be a success after all. “Mom! Make Mitch leave us alone.”
“You better come and look at this floor,” Mitchell advised his mother.
“Oh, my goodness!” exclaimed Mrs. Huff, when she had come to inspect the kitchen floor and saw the rich layer of white lather. “And I have to start dinner in a little while.”
“Too bad it isn’t whipped cream,” said Mitchell. “Then they could lick it up.” Amy glared at her brother while Bonnie and Marla went into a gale of giggles. One would think Mitchell’s remark was the funniest thing anyone had ever said. Well, they could laugh. They didn’t have a twin brother.
“It will take forever to rinse it off,” said Mrs. Huff. “How in the world can you get rid of it?”
“They could shovel it off if they had shovels,” suggested Mitchell.
Bonnie and Marla thought this idea was hilarious. Bonnie scooped up a handful of lather and tried throwing it toward the sink, but it only drifted to the floor in bits of foam. Marla thought this sight was funny, but she could afford to laugh, Amy thought. The kitchen floor wasn’t hers, and her brother wasn’t standing there making fun of them. Marla didn’t even have a brother, and she did not understand how a sister sometimes suffered.
“How about the dustpan?” suggested Mitchell.
�
��That’s a great idea,” agreed Bonnie. “We could scoop our way to the sink.”
“I know,” said Mrs. Huff. “Shirt cardboard. Mitch, go to the closet and get some of those cardboards the laundry puts in your father’s shirts.”
Amy could see that her brother was only too eager to help. He ran down the hall and quickly returned with several shirt cardboards, which he handed across the lather to the girls. Bonnie used hers as a sort of snow-plow and pushed a path to the sink.
“Better hurry, girls,” said Mrs. Huff. “It’s getting on toward dinnertime.”
“I’ll help,” said Mitchell, who already had a shirt cardboard in his hand.
“Mom!” protested Amy.
“Better let him help,” said Mrs. Huff. “It really is getting late.”
“Yes, let him,” said Marla and Bonnie, who looked hot and tired. “We have to be home by five o’clock.”
Amy, who did not want to be left with all that lather to clean up by herself, was forced to give in. The three girls and Mitchell went to work scooping up lather into the sink and dissolving it by running cold water over it.
Mitchell was the most energetic worker of all. He enjoyed working hard when he could use his muscles. He scooped and rinsed and rubbed and helped scour the sink. Finally he spread paths of old newspapers over the floor.
“Thanks a lot, Mitch.” Bonnie was much more grateful than she really needed to be.
“Mitch ought to get a housekeeper badge,” said Marla, and she and Bonnie went into another gale of giggles while Mrs. Huff signed their Girl Scout handbooks to show they had completed the requirement.
“Oh, be quiet,” said Mitchell, looking embarrassed but pleased.
“Thanks, Mitch,” said Marla. “We never would have finished without you.”
Mitchell looked even more embarrassed and even more pleased.
“Thanks.” Amy could not appear completely ungrateful beside Marla and Bonnie, but the whole afternoon had been too much. That Mitch! He was always there. She never had anything all to herself. As soon as her friends had gone out the door and her mother was alone in the kitchen chopping parsley, Amy marched across a newspaper path to her side and said, “Mom, I want to have a talk with you.”
“All right, Amy,” said Mrs. Huff, laying down her knife. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Mitch,” said Amy, coming directly to the heart of the matter. “Why does he have to hang around every single time I have company? It isn’t fair. It seems to me I should be able to have company once in a while without my brother hanging around. I feel deprived.”
“I wouldn’t say you were exactly deprived, but you do have a point,” said Mrs. Huff. “You’ll have to admit that today was a problem. It was raining and Mitch couldn’t play outside and none of his friends were home. And he was a help.”
“Yes, I know,” admitted Amy. “But just the same, I wish just once he wouldn’t hang around when I have friends over.”
“All right, Amy,” said Mrs. Huff. “The next time you and your friends are working on a project, I’ll see to it that Mitch has something else to do.”
“Thanks, Mom,” said Amy gratefully. “Nobody wants a boy hanging around.”
“You’d be surprised, Amy,” said Mrs. Huff, as she went back to chopping parsley. “You’d be surprised.”
Amy went into her room and wrote on her calendar, “Mitchell was a pest,” and drew a skull and crossbones below the words.
7
Mitch and Bernadette
One morning at breakfast Mitchell was studying some pictures of a championship boxing match in the sports section of the morning paper to see if he could pick up a few pointers in case he ever needed to use them against Alan Hibbler. A bird chirping on the pinecone outside the window made him look up from the paper, but it was his sister in her Girl Scout uniform who caught his eyes. Amy made a face at him, even though he had not done a thing to her except beat her into the bathroom a few minutes ago and then get to the comic section before she did.
“A Girl Scout is courteous,” said Mitchell, who was familiar with the Girl Scout laws and did not let his sister forget them. Then he made a worse face at her.
Amy made a still worse face back at Mitchell.
Mitchell kicked his sister under the table.
Amy looked innocently out the window at a sparrow pecking at the peanut butter on the pinecone and asked, “What is that brown bird with the striped head?” while she kicked back at Mitchell.
“It’s a sparrow,” said Mrs. Huff, the nearsighted birdwatcher. “Mitch, your eyes are sharper than mine. What kind of sparrow is it?”
“White-crowned,” answered Mitchell, as he slid down in his chair so he could kick his sister harder.
Mr. Huff set his coffee cup on its saucer with a crash. “All right. Who started it?” he demanded.
Amy sat up straight and said nobly, “Father, I cannot tell a lie. Mitchell started it.” Her nobility disappeared in a burst of giggles.
“You speak with a forked tongue,” said Mitchell, glowering at his sister.
“I speak with a straight tongue,” contradicted Amy. “You did kick me first.”
“Yes, but—” Mitchell stopped, recognizing defeat when he saw it. If he said she started it by making a face, then she could say he started it by beating her into the bathroom.
“It doesn’t matter who started it. Just stop it, both of you,” ordered Mr. Huff. “And please stop talking like a pair of television Indians.”
“Sure, Dad,” said Amy agreeably with a triumphant look at her brother. After all, she knew and he knew that she had won.
When his parents were not looking, Mitch made a gesture of pulling back his fist as if he would like to punch his sister in the nose. Girls, he thought bitterly, as he picked up his plate and glass and carried them into the kitchen. He had had a lot of trouble with girls lately. If he barely brushed a girl’s shoulder on his way to the pencil sharpener, she would raise her hand and tell the teacher he had hit her. If he denied it, at least two other girls were sure to say, “I saw him, Miss Colby, honest I did.”
“Mitch, isn’t this the day you pan gold?” asked Amy, and for once Mitchell was grateful to her for reminding him.
“My permission slip!” Mitchell jumped up from the table and searched through the pockets of his jacket until he found half a sheet of mimeographed paper that he had folded into a very small square several days ago. “Here, Dad. Will you sign this so I can go pan gold?”
“Pan gold?” asked Mr. Huff. “Where?”
“You see, Dad,” Amy began. “All the fourth grades—”
“Amy,” said Mrs. Huff, sounding a little tired. “Let Mitchell tell it.”
Mitchell stopped glaring at his sister. “All the fourth grades are studying California history and—well, it tells about it on the slip. You know that new savings-and-loan company downtown? The Golden West Savings and Loan Company? They have a place in the lobby where you can pan gold. There’s even a man in authentic gold-rush clothes to help. And because the fourth grades are studying California history, they get to go down and pan gold so they will really know what it was like during the gold rush. We have to write a composition afterwards, but we get to keep the gold. It’s free.”
“Astonishing,” said Mr. Huff, studying the slip. “You mean to say there’s a place in the lobby of the Golden West Savings and Loan Company where you can actually pan gold?”
“That’s right,” said Mitchell. “The savings-and-loan company guarantees that everyone in the class will get some gold. It’s real gold, too.”
“I hope it doesn’t belong to the people who have deposited their money in the savings-and-loan company,” said Mr. Huff.
“Of course not, Dad. The gravel with the gold in it is imported from Alaska.”
“Imported gravel. Even more astonishing.” Mr. Huff took his pen with the fine accountant’s point out of his inside pocket and signed his name, giving his son permission to go on the field t
rip. “What is California coming to that it has to import gravel from Alaska?”
“Our class gets to go first, so we will probably get the most gold,” said Mitchell.
At school Mitchell found that everyone in his class was just as excited about the field trip to the Golden West Savings and Loan Company as he was. Bernadette, in a somewhat rumpled Girl Scout uniform, was even wearing two matching socks for the occasion.
During social studies Miss Colby said to the class, “Since we are studying the gold-rush period of California, I think it would be nice if someone built us a model of Sutter’s sawmill, where gold was discovered, to add to our collection of things to display at open house in the spring.” During the period of Spanish settlement Jill Joslin, the girl whom the class called Little Miss Perfect, had built an elaborate model of a mission out of sugar cubes (it was rumored that her mother had done most of the work) and had even managed to paint it without melting the sugar. The paint made it look as if it were built of real little adobe bricks and also kept the class from eating it.
“Who would like to build us Sutter’s sawmill?” asked Miss Colby.
Mitchell raised his hand along with half the class, but Bernadette Stumpf did not raise her hand. Instead she made exaggerated gestures of pointing across the aisle at Mitchell.
Miss Colby smiled. “Mitchell, how would you like to build us a sawmill?”
“I’d like to,” said Mitchell. He was pleased to be chosen, but wondered if Miss Colby would have selected him if Bernadette had not pointed so wildly. When his teacher handed him a box of toothpicks to use in building the sawmill, he was a little surprised, but he stuffed it into his pocket and said nothing.
“Please bring it in by Friday when we finish our unit,” said Miss Colby.
At one o’clock the class lined up, two by two, to walk down the hill to the Golden West Savings and Loan Company. Mitchell and his friend Bill Collins tried to be the last in line, so they would get to walk farthest from the teacher, but Bernadette, who had no partner, ended up there instead. For a fraction of a second Mitchell saw, or thought he saw, in Bernadette’s dark eyes a look of hurt, the same sort of look he had seen in Amy’s eyes when he had been invited to a birthday party and she had not. Miss Colby had to tell Sarah Smith to walk with Bernadette.
Mitch and Amy Page 7