Ramona to the Rescue

4

Ramona to the Rescue

The Quimbys said very little at breakfast the next morning. Beezus was moody and silent. Mrs. Quimby, in her white uni-form, was in a hurry to leave for work.

Picky-picky resentfully ate a few bites of Puss-puddy. Mr. Quimby did not say, “I told you he would eat it when he was really hungry,” but the whole family was thinking it. He might as well have said it.

Ramona wished her family would cheer up. When they had finished eating, she found herself alone with her father.

“Bring me an ashtray, please,” said Mr. Quimby. “That’s a good girl.”

Reluctantly Ramona brought the ashtray and, with her face rigid with disapproval, watched her father light his after-breakfast cigarette.

“Why so solemn?” he asked as he shook out the flame of the match.

“Is it true what Beezus said?” Ramona demanded.

“About what?” asked Mr. Quimby.

Ramona had a feeling her father really knew what she meant.“About smoking will make your lungs turn black,” she answered.

Mr. Quimby blew a puff of smoke toward the ceiling.“I expect to be one of those old men with a long gray beard who has his picture in the paper on his hundredth birthday and who tells reporters he owes his long life to cigarettes and whiskey.” Ramona was not amused.“Daddy”—her voice was stern—“you are just being silly again.”

Her father took a deep breath and blew three smoke rings across the table, a most unsatisfactory answer to Ramona.

On the way to school Ramona cut across the lawn for the pleasure of leaving foot-prints in the dew and then did not bother to look back to see where she had walked.

Instead of running or skipping, she trudged.

Nothing was much fun anymore when her family quarreled and then was silent at breakfast and her father’s lungs were turning black from smoke.

Even though Mrs. Rogers announced, “Today our second grade is going to have fun learning,” as she wrote the date on the blackboard, school turned out to be dreary because the class was having Review again.

Review meant boredom for some, like Ramona, because they had to repeat what they already knew, and worry for others, like Davy, because they had to try again what they could not do in the first place. Review was the worst part of school. Ramona passed the morning looking through her workbook for words with double o’s like book and cook. She carefully drew eyebrows over the o’s and dots within, making the o’s look like crossed eyes.Then she drew mouths with the ends turned down under the eyes.When she finished, she had a cross-looking workbook that matched her feelings.

She was in no hurry to leave the building at recess, but when she did, Davy yelled,

“Look out! Here comes Ramona!” and began to run, so of course Ramona had to chase him around and around the playground until time to go inside again.

Running until she was hot and panting made Ramona feel so much better that she was filled with sudden determination. Her father’s lungs were not going to turn black.

She would not let them. Ramona made up her mind, right then and there in the middle of arithmetic, that she was going to save her father’s life.

That afternoon after school Ramona gathered up her crayons and papers from the kitchen table, took them into her room, and shut the door. She got down on her hands and knees and went to work on the bedroom floor, printing a sign in big letters.

Unfortunately, she did not plan ahead and soon reached the edge of the paper. She could not find the Scotch tape to fasten two pieces of paper together, so she had to continue on another line. When she finished, her sign read: It would do. Ramona found a pin and fastened her sign to the living-room curtains, where her father could not miss it. Then she waited, frightened by her daring.

Mr. Quimby, although he must have seen the sign, said nothing until after dinner when he had finished his pumpkin pie. He asked for an ashtray and then inquired, “Say, who is this Mr. King?” “What Mr. King?” asked Ramona, walking into his trap.

“Nosmo King,” answered her father without cracking a smile.

Chagrined, Ramona tore down her sign, crumpled it, threw it into the fireplace, and stalked out of the room, resolving to do better the next time.

The next day after school Ramona found the Scotch tape and disappeared into her room to continue work on her plan to save her father’s life. While she was working, she heard the phone ring and waited, tense, as the whole family now waited whenever the telephone rang. She heard her father clear his throat before he answered.“Hello?”After a pause he said, “Just a minute, Howie. I’ll call her.” There was disappointment in his voice. No one was calling to offer him a job after all.

“Ramona, can you come over and play?” Howie asked, when Ramona went to the telephone.

Ramona considered. Of course they would have to put up with Howie’s messy little sister, Willa Jean, but she and Howie would have fun building things if they could think of something to build. Yes, she would like to play with Howie, but saving her father’s life was more important. “No, thank you.

Not today,” she said.“I have important work to do.”

Just before dinner she taped to the refrigerator door a picture of a cigarette so long she had to fasten three pieces of paper together to draw it. After drawing the cigarette, she had crossed it out with a big black X and under it she had printed in big letters the word BAD. Beezus giggled when she saw it, and Mrs. Quimby smiled as if she were trying not to smile. Ramona was filled with fresh courage. She had allies. Her father had better watch out.

When Mr. Quimby saw the picture, he stopped and looked while Ramona waited.

“Hmm,” he said, backing away for a better view. “An excellent likeness. The artist shows talent.” And that was all he said.

Ramona felt let down, although she was not sure what she had expected. Anger, perhaps? Punishment? A promise to give up smoking?

The next morning the sign was gone, and that afternoon Ramona had to wait until Beezus came home from school to ask,“How do you spell pollution?” When Beezus printed it out on a piece of paper, Ramona went to work making a sign that said, Stop Air Pollution.

“Let me help,” said Beezus, and the two girls, kneeling on the floor, printed a dozen signs. Smoking Stinks. Cigarettes Start Forest Fires. Smoking Is Hazardous to Your Health.

Ramona learned new words that afternoon.

Fortunately Mr. Quimby went out to examine the car, which was still making the tappety-tappety noise. This gave the girls a chance to tape the signs to the mantel, the refrigerator, the dining-room curtains, the door of the hall closet, and every other con-spicuous place they could think of.

This time Mr. Quimby simply ignored the signs. Ramona and Beezus might as well have saved themselves a lot of work for all he seemed to notice. But how could he miss so many signs? He must be pretending. He had to be pretending. Obviously the girls would have to step up their campaign.

By now they were running out of big pieces of paper, and they knew better than to ask their parents to buy more, not when the family was so short of money.

“We can make little signs on scraps of paper,” said Ramona, and that was what they did.Together they made tiny signs that said, No Smoking, Stop Air Pollution, Smoking Is Bad for Your Health, and Stamp Out Cigarettes.

On some Ramona drew stick figures of people stretched out flat and dead, and on one, a cat on his back with his feet in the air.

These they hid wherever their father was sure to find them—in his bathrobe pocket, fastened around the handle of his toothbrush with a rubber band, inside his shoes, under his electric razor.

Then they waited. And waited. Mr. Quimby said nothing while he continued to smoke. Ramona held her nose whenever she saw her father with a cigarette. He appeared not to notice.The girls felt discouraged and let down.

Once more Ramona and Beezus devised a plan, the most daring plan of all because they had to get hold of their father’s cigarettes just before dinner. Fortunately he had tinkered with the car, still trying to find the reason for the tappety-tappety-tap, and had to take a shower before dinner, which gave the girls barely enough time to carry out their plan.

All through dinner the girls exchanged excited glances, and by the time her father asked her to fetch an ashtray, Ramona could hardly sit still she was so excited.

As usual her father pulled his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. As usual he tapped the package against his hand, and as usual a cigarette, or what appeared to be a cigarette, slid out. Mr. Quimby must have sensed that what he thought was a cigarette was lighter than it should be, because he paused to look at it. While Ramona held her breath, he frowned, looked more closely, unrolled the paper, and discovered it was a tiny sign that said, Smoking Is Bad! Without a word, he crumpled it and pulled out another—he thought—cigarette, which turned out to be a sign saying, Stamp Out Cigarettes! Mr. Quimby crumpled it and tossed it onto the table along with the first sign.

“Ramona.” Mr. Quimby’s voice was stern.

“My grandmother used to say, ‘First time is funny, second time is silly—’” Mr. Quimby’s grandmother’s wisdom was interrupted by a fit of coughing.

Ramona was frightened. Maybe her father’s lungs already had begun to turn black.

Beezus looked triumphant. See, we told you smoking was bad for you, she was clearly thinking.

Mrs. Quimby looked both amused and concerned.

Mr. Quimby looked embarrassed, pounded himself on the chest with his fist, took a sip of coffee, and said, “Something must have caught in my throat.” When his family remained silent, he said,“All right, Ramona.

As I was saying, enough is enough.” Ramona scowled and slid down in her chair. Nothing was ever fair for second graders. Beezus helped, but Ramona was getting all the blame. She also felt defeated.

Nobody ever paid any attention to second graders except to scold them. No matter how hard she tried to save her father’s life, he was not going to let her save it.

Ramona gave up, and soon found she missed the excitement of planning the next step in her campaign against her father’s smoking. Her afternoons after school seemed empty. Howie was home with ton-sillitis, and she had no one to play with. She wished there were more children her age in her neighborhood. She was so lonely she picked up the telephone and dialed the Quimbys’ telephone number to see if she could answer herself. All she got was a busy signal and a reprimand from her father for playing with the telephone when someone might be trying to reach him about a job.

On top of all this, the family had pumpkin pie for dinner.

“Not again!” protested Beezus. The family had eaten pumpkin pie and pumpkin custard since the night the cat ate part of the jack-o’-lantern. Beezus had once told Ramona that she thought her mother had tried to hide pumpkin in the meat loaf, but she wasn’t sure because everything was all ground up together.

“I’m sorry, but there aren’t many pumpkin recipes. I can’t bear to waste good food,” said Mrs. Quimby. “But I do remember seeing a recipe for pumpkin soup someplace—” “No!” Her family was unanimous.

Ramona was so disappointed because her father had ignored all her little signs that she did not feel much like eating, and especially not pumpkin pie for what seemed like the hundredth time. She eyed her triangle of pie and knew she could not make it go down.

She was sick of pumpkin.“Are you sure you cut off all the parts with cat spit on them?” she asked her mother.

“Ramona!” Mr. Quimby, who had been stirring his coffee, dropped his spoon.“Please! We are eating.”

They had been eating, but after Ramona’s remark no one ate a bite of pie.

Mr. Quimby continued to smoke, and Ramona continued to worry. Then one afternoon, when Ramona came home from school, she found the back door locked.

When she pounded on it with her fist, no one answered. She went to the front door, rang the doorbell, and waited. Silence. Lonely silence. She tried the door even though she knew it was locked. More silence.

Nothing like this had ever happened to Ramona before. Someone was always waiting when she came home from school.

Ramona was frightened. Tears filled her eyes as she sat down on the cold concrete steps to think. Where could her father be?

She thought of her friends at school, Davy and Sharon, who did not have fathers.Where had their fathers gone? Everybody had a father sometime.Where could they go?

Ramona’s insides tightened with fear.

Maybe her father was angry with her. Maybe he had gone away because she tried to make him stop smoking. She thought she was saving his life, but maybe she was being mean to him. Her mother said she must not annoy her father, because he was worried about being out of work.

Maybe she had made him so angry he did not love her anymore.

Maybe he had gone away because he did not love her. She thought of all the scary things she had seen on television—houses that had fallen down in earthquakes, people shooting people, big hairy men on motor-cycles—and knew she needed her father to keep her safe.

The cold from the concrete seeped through Ramona’s clothes. She wrapped her arms around her knees to keep warm as she watched a dried leaf scratch along the driveway in the autumn wind. She listened to the honking of a flock of wild geese flying through the gray clouds on their way south for the winter.They came from Canada, her father had once told her, but that was before he had gone away. Raindrops began to dot the driveway, and tears dotted Ramona’s skirt. She put her head down on her knees and cried.Why had she been so mean to her father? If he ever came back he could smoke all he wanted, fill the ashtrays and turn the air blue, and she wouldn’t say a single word.

She just wanted her father back, black lungs and all.

And suddenly there he was, scrunching through the leaves on the driveway with the collar of his windbreaker turned up against the wind and his old fishing hat pulled down over his eyes.“Sorry I’m late,” he said, as he got out his key. “Is that what all this boohooing is about?” Ramona wiped her sweater sleeve across her nose and stood up. She was so glad to see her father and so relieved that he had not gone away, that anger blazed up. Her tears became angry tears. Fathers were not supposed to worry their little girls.“Where have you been?” she demanded.“You’re supposed to be here when I come home from school!

I thought you had gone away and left me.”

“Take it easy. I wouldn’t go off and leave you. Why would I do a thing like that?” Mr. Quimby unlocked the door and, with a hand on Ramona’s shoulder, guided her into the living room. “I’m sorry I had to worry you. I was collecting my unemployment insurance, and I had to wait in a long line.” Ramona’s anger faded. She knew all about long lines and understood how difficult they were. She had waited in lines for her turn at the slides in the park, she had waited in lines in the school lunchroom back in the days when her family could spare lunch money once in a while, she had waited in lines with her mother at the check-out counter in the market, when she was little she had waited in long, long lines to see Santa Claus in the department store, and—these were the worst, most boring lines of all—she had waited in lines with her mother in the bank. She felt bad because her father had had to wait in line, and she also understood that collecting unemployment insurance did not make him happy.

“Did somebody try to push ahead of you?” Ramona was wise in the ways of lines.

“No.The line was unusually long today.” Mr. Quimby went into the kitchen to make himself a cup of instant coffee. While he waited for the water to heat, he poured Ramona a glass of milk and gave her a graham cracker.

“Feeling better?” he asked.

Ramona looked at her father over the rim of her glass and nodded, spilling milk down her front. Silently he handed her a dish towel to wipe up while he poured hot water over the instant coffee in his mug.Then he reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a package of cigarettes, looked at it a moment, and tossed it onto the counter. Ramona had never seen her father do this before. Could it be . . .

Mr. Quimby leaned against the counter and took a sip of coffee. “What would you like to do?” he asked Ramona.

Ramona considered before she answered.

“Something big and important.” But what? she wondered. Break a record in that book of records Beezus talked about? Climb Mount Hood?

“Such as?” her father asked.

Ramona finished scrubbing the front of her sweater with the dish towel. “Well—” she said, thinking. “You know that big bridge across the Columbia River?” “Yes. The Interstate Bridge. The one we cross when we drive to Vancouver.”

“I’ve always wanted to stop on that bridge and get out of the car and stand with one foot in Oregon and one foot in Washington.”

“A good idea, but not practical,” said Mr. Quimby. “Your mother has the car, and I doubt if cars are allowed to stop on the bridge.What else?”

“It’s not exactly important, but I always like to crayon,” said Ramona. How long would her father leave his cigarettes on the counter?

Mr. Quimby set his cup down. “I have a great idea! Let’s draw the longest picture in the world.” He opened a drawer and pulled out a roll of shelf paper. When he tried to unroll it on the kitchen floor, the paper rolled itself up again. Ramona quickly solved that problem by Scotch-taping the end of the roll to the floor. Together she and her father unrolled the paper across the kitchen and knelt with a box of crayons between them.

“What shall we draw?” she asked.

“How about the state of Oregon?” he suggested. “That’s big enough.”

Ramona’s imagination was excited. “I’ll begin with the Interstate Bridge,” she said.

“And I’ll tackle Mount Hood,” said her father.

Together they went to work, Ramona on the end of the shelf paper and her father halfway across the kitchen. With crayons Ramona drew a long black bridge with a girl standing astride a line in the center. She drew blue water under the bridge, even though the Columbia River always looked gray. She added gray clouds, gray dots for raindrops, and all the while she was drawing she was trying to find courage to tell her father something.

Ramona glanced at her father’s picture, and sure enough he had drawn Mount Hood peaked with a hump on the south side exactly the way it looked in real life on the days when the clouds lifted.

“I think you draw better than anybody in the whole world,” said Ramona.

Mr. Quimby smiled.“Not quite,” he said.

“Daddy—” Ramona summoned courage.

“I’m sorry I was mean to you.”

“You weren’t mean.” Mr. Quimby was adding trees at the base of the mountain.

“You’re right, you know.”

“Am I?” Ramona wanted to be sure.

“Yes.”

This answer gave Ramona even more courage.“Is that why you didn’t have a cigarette with your coffee? Are you going to stop smoking?”

“I’ll try,” answered Mr. Quimby, his eyes on his drawing. “I’ll try.”

Ramona was filled with joy, enthusiasm, and relief. “You can do it, Daddy! I know you can do it.”

Her father seemed less positive. “I hope so,” he answered, “but if I succeed, Picky-picky will still have to eat Puss-puddy.”

“He can try, too,” said Ramona and slashed dark V’s across her gray sky to represent a flock of geese flying south for the winter.