The Telephone Call

7

The Telephone Call

By the time school was over Ramona had forgotten about the pajamas in her desk, and that evening she was so busy practicing her name in cursive writing that they remained forgotten. No more babyish printing for Ramona. Mrs. Rudge had taught her to write in what Ramona used to call “that rumply stuff.” And write she did.

She wrote in pencil, ballpoint pen, and crayon on any paper she could find—paper bags, old envelopes, the backs of arithmetic papers, around the edge of the newspaper.

She wrote her name with her finger in steam on the bathroom mirror when her father had taken a shower after work. Before supper she wrote her name in dust on the top of the television set. After supper she went outside where, beneath the porch light, she wrote Ramona Quimby in chalk on each of the front steps. When she came back into the house, she found her mother and Beezus on the couch studying pictures in a paper-back book.

“Let me see, too,” said Ramona, wiping her chalky fingers on the seat of her slacks and twitching her nose.

“It’s just a book on how to cut hair that I ran across,” said Mrs. Quimby. “I thought I would try to learn to cut Beezus’s hair so it would look like the ice skater on television.” “See, Mother,” said Beezus. “First you twist the top hair up out of the way and cut the bottom hair first.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Quimby. “That doesn’t look so difficult.”

Ramona felt left out. Somehow that trip to the beauty school had brought her mother and Beezus closer together.They were friends again, close friends.

“Bedtime, Ramona,” said Mrs. Quimby, still studying the book.

A terrible thought crossed Ramona’s mind. Her new pajamas! She had left them rolled up in her desk at school. Then Ramona had an even worse thought. This was Friday. She could not bring her pajamas home until Monday. How could she explain if her family found out?

Ramona made up her mind right then and there that neither her parents nor Beezus would find out because she was going to keep those pajamas a secret.Without waiting for a second reminder Ramona was in and out of the bathtub in no time. She could not locate the old pajamas she had taken off the night before, but she did come across another too-small pair in a drawer. She put them on, turned off the light, hopped into bed, and pulled the covers up tight around her ears.

But what if she fell asleep before her parents came in to kiss her good-night?

Ramona took no chances. “Come and kiss me good-night,” she sang out while hanging on tight to the sheet and blankets.

Mr. Quimby was first. “What’s got into you, Ramona?” he asked after he had kissed her. “You forgot to beg to stay up just a little longer to watch TV or finish drawing a picture or read another chapter. You forgot to remind us you don’t have to go to school tomorrow. Don’t you feel good?” Ramona giggled. “Daddy, you’re so silly.

I feel fine.” She was pleased that her father had noticed she now read books with chapters.

Mrs. Quimby was next. Ramona pulled the covers tight around her ears when she heard her mother coming down the hall. Mrs.

Quimby kissed Ramona and then looked at her in the dim light from the hall. “Are you cold?” she asked.

“No,” answered Ramona.

“If you are, I can get another blanket from the linen closet,” said Mrs. Quimby.Then she added, “Nighty-night. Sweet dreams.” That was close, thought Ramona with a twitch of her nose. When she said her prayers, she added a request at the end.

Please, God, do not let anyone find out I wore my pajamas to school. She felt that although God was probably too busy to think about her pajamas, asking would not hurt and might even help.

Saturday morning she dressed in the closet and hid the too-small pajamas in her bottom drawer. She was happy to discover that her father was home for the morning, even though he would have to work at the ShopRite Market Saturday afternoon and evening. Today was going to be a good day.

The sun was shining, the sidewalk dry, and her father could watch her skate.

That is, she was happy until Mr. Quimby looked around the living room and said, “This is a home, not a base camp.” He had recently watched a television program on mountain climbing. “Let’s all pitch in and clean this place up. Ramona, pick up all the newspapers and magazines and dust the living room. Beezus, you can run the vacuum cleaner. Then both of you tackle your rooms.

Change the sheets and straighten up. Every kettle must rest on its own bottom around here.” He did not mention that this was one of his grandmother’s sayings.

Except for washing the egg beater in sudsy water so she could beat up a lot of suds, Ramona did not care much for housework, and this morning she longed to be outside racing up and down the sidewalk on her roller skates. However, she carried the old newspapers out to the garage without complain-ing and hastily flicked a dustcloth around the living room while Beezus plugged in the vacuum cleaner and made it growl back and forth across the carpet. Mr. Quimby went off to clean the bathroom while Mrs. Quimby was busy in the kitchen.

In a playful mood Beezus pushed the vacuum cleaner right up to Ramona’s shoes.

Ramona squealed as if she expected the vacuum cleaner to nibble her toes. Beezus pursued her with the vacuum cleaner.

Around the carpet they went until Ramona said, “Ha-ha, you can’t catch me!” and crawled behind the couch. Beezus returned to running the vacuum cleaner properly, back and forth in straight lines, the way their father mowed the lawn.

Ramona sat hugging her knees behind the couch. She was in no hurry, as her father put it, to tackle her room.

Ramona sat there behind the couch, a kettle resting on its bottom, thinking. She thought how embarrassed she would be if her family found out she had worn her pajamas to school. She thought about her mother and Beezus and what good friends they had become, almost as if they were the same age.

As Ramona sat letting these thoughts slide through her mind, the telephone rang in the kitchen. Above the growl of the vacuum cleaner, she heard her mother say, “Why hel lo!” as if she were surprised to hear from the person calling.

Who had surprised her mother? Ramona listened hard. Beezus must have been curious, too, for she turned off the vacuum cleaner, which made eavesdropping easier for Ramona.

“Oh . . . ? Yes . . .Yes . . . Oh, does she?” Mrs. Quimby went on in a friendly polite voice quite different from the friendly voice she used when she talked to her sister, the girls’ Aunt Beatrice.

Who does what? Ramona wondered, alert, since she was usually the one who had done something. Her mother laughed. Ramona felt indignant without knowing why. She could not think of anything she had done that anyone would telephone her mother about.

Mrs. Quimby continued for some time, but Ramona could make no sense out of the conversation. Finally her mother said,

“Thank you for telling me, Mrs. Rudge.” Then she hung up.

The sound of her teacher’s name gave Ramona a strange feeling, as if she were in an elevator that had suddenly gone down when she expected it to go up. When she stopped feeling as if the floor had dropped beneath her, she was furious. So that was why her mother had laughed. Mrs. Rudge had told! She had telephoned her mother and tattled. And her mother thought it was funny! Ramona would never forgive either of them. Never, never, never.

Beezus turned on the vacuum cleaner again. Ramona crawled on her hands and knees from behind the couch and was surprised to see that her mother had come into the living room.“What have you been doing back there?” asked Mrs. Quimby.

“Resting on my bottom,” said Ramona with a scowl.

Beezus switched off the vacuum cleaner again. Her turn had come to foresee an interesting argument.

Ramona faced her mother. “Mrs. Rudge told!” she shouted. “And she promised she would never tell. And then you had to go and laugh!”

“Now calm down.” Mrs. Quimby plucked a fluff of dust from Ramona’s sleeve.

“I won’t calm down!” yelled Ramona so loud her father came down the hall to see what was going on.“I hate Mrs. Rudge! She’s a tattletale. She doesn’t love me and she tells fibs!” Ramona saw her mother and father exchange a familiar look that said,Which of us is going to handle this one?

“Hate is a strong word, Ramona,” said Mrs. Quimby quietly.

“Not strong enough,” said Ramona.

“This looks like nine on the Richter scale,” said Mr. Quimby, as if Ramona were an earthquake.

“And you and Daddy talk about me in your room at night,” Ramona stormed at her mother.

“Someday, Ramona,” said her father,“you are going to have to learn that the world does not revolve around you.”

“I don’t care what Mrs. Rudge says,” shouted Ramona.“I didn’t leave my pajamas at school on purpose. I forgot.” Mrs. Quimby looked astonished. “Left your pajamas— What on earth are your pajamas doing at school?” She was plainly trying to stifle a laugh.

Ramona was both surprised and bewil-dered. If her mother did not know about her pajamas, what could Mrs. Rudge have said?

“What on earth are your pajamas doing at school?” Ramona’s mother asked again.

The whole story—her feeling that the flannel was as soft as bunny fur and how she pretended to be a fireman so she wouldn’t have to take her pajamas off—flashed through Ramona’s mind and embarrassed her.“I won’t tell,” she said, folding her arms defiantly.

“She probably took them for Show and Tell,” volunteered Beezus.

Ramona gave her sister a look of con-tempt. Second graders in Mrs. Rudge’s room did not have Show and Tell every day, only when someone had something really important and educational to bring such as a butterfly that had hatched out of a cocoon in a jar. And Beezus should know that no second grader would take pajamas to school for Show and Tell.That would be too babyish even for kindergarten. Beezus knew these things. She had been through them all.

She was just trying to make Ramona look babyish.

Ramona was about to shout, I did not! but decided this would be unwise. Beezus had supplied a reason, a very weak reason, why she might have taken her pajamas to school.

Apparently Mrs. Quimby did not accept Beezus’s explanation either, for she said,“Your pajamas did not get out of bed and run along beside you to school. Oh, well, I don’t suppose it matters.” Ramona scowled. Her mother need not think she could win her over by being funny.

She was mad and she was going to stay mad.

She was mad at Beezus for always being her mother’s girl. She was mad at her teacher for telling her mother something ( what?). She was mad at her parents for not being upset because she was mad. She was mad at herself for letting it out that she had left her pajamas at school.

“Nobody likes me. Nobody in the whole world,” said Ramona, warming to her subject as the cat walked disdainfully through the room on his way to peace on Beezus’s bed.“Not even my own mother and father.

Not even the cat. Beezus gets all the attention around here. Even Picky-picky likes Beezus more than he likes me!” She was pleased that her father stayed in the living room and she didn’t lose any of her audi-ence. “You’ll be sorry someday when I’m rich and famous.” “I didn’t know you were planning to be rich and famous,” said Mr. Quimby.

Neither had Ramona until that moment.

“What do you mean, I get all the attention around here?” demanded Beezus. “Nobody tapes my schoolwork to the refrigerator door.

We can hardly find the refrigerator, it is so buried under all your drawings and junk!” Both parents looked at Beezus in surprise. “Why, Beezus,” said Mrs. Quimby, “I had no idea you minded.” “Well, I do,” said Beezus crossly. “And Ramona always gets out of things like washing dishes because she is too little. She’ll probably still be too little when she’s eighty.” “See?” said Ramona. “Beezus doesn’t like me because my artwork is stuck to the refrigerator.” Her parents weren’t supposed to feel sorry for Beezus. They were supposed to feel sorry for Ramona.

“I’m always in the way,” said Ramona.

“You have to park me with Howie’s grandmother so you can go to work, and Howie’s grandmother doesn’t like me. She thinks 175

I’m so terrible she probably won’t want me around anymore, and then there won’t be anybody to look after me and you can’t go to work. So there!” Ramona flopped down on the couch, waiting for someone to tell her she was wrong.

Ramona’s mother and father said nothing.

“Everybody picks on me all the time,” said Ramona. Maybe she really would be so bad Mrs. Kemp would say, I simply cannot put up with Ramona another day.

Silence.

Ramona made up her mind to shock her parents, really shock them. “I am going to run away,” she announced.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Mr. Quimby as if running away were a perfectly natural thing to do.

“When are you leaving?” inquired Ramona’s mother politely. The question was almost more than Ramona could bear.

Her mother was supposed to say, Oh, Ramona, please, please don’t leave me!

“Today,” Ramona managed to say with quivering lips. “This morning.”

“She just wants you to feel sorry for her,” said heartless Beezus.“She wants you to stop her.”

Ramona waited for her mother or father to say something, but neither spoke. Finally there was nothing for Ramona to do but get up from the couch.“I guess I’ll go pack,” she said, and started slowly toward her room.

No one tried to prevent her. When she reached her room, tears began to fall. She got out her Q-tip box with all her money, forty-three cents, in it. Still no one came to beg her not to leave. She looked around for something in which to pack, but all she could find was an old doll’s nursing kit. Ramona unzipped it and placed her Q-tip box inside.

She added her best box of crayons and a pair of clean socks. Outside she heard the cheerful ching-chong, ching-chong of roller skates on cement. Some children were happy.

If nobody stopped her, where would she run to? Not Howie’s house, even though Howie was no longer mad at her. His grandmother was not paid to look after her on Saturday. She could take the bus to Aunt Beatrice’s apartment house, but Aunt Beatrice would bring her back home. Maybe she could live in the park and sleep under the bushes in the cold. Poor little Ramona, all alone in the park, shivering in the dark.Well, at least it was not raining. That was something. And there were no big wild animals, just chipmunks.

She heard her mother coming down the hall.Tears stopped. Ramona was about to be rescued. Now her mother would say, Please don’t run away. We love you and want you to stay.

Instead Mrs. Quimby walked into the bedroom with a suitcase in one hand and two bananas in the other. “You will need something to pack in,” she told Ramona.“Let me help.” She opened the suitcase on the unmade bed and placed the bananas inside. “In case you get hungry,” she explained.

Ramona was too shocked to say anything.

Mothers weren’t supposed to help their children run away.“You’ll need your roller skates in case you want to travel fast,” said Mrs.

Quimby. “Where are they?”

As if she were walking in her sleep, Ramona pulled her roller skates from a jumble of toys in the bottom of her closet and handed them to her mother, who placed them at the bottom of the suitcase. How could her mother not love a little girl like Ramona?

“Always pack heavy things at the bottom,” advised Mrs. Quimby. “Now where are your boots in case it rains?” She looked around the room. “And don’t forget your Betsy book.

And your little box of baby teeth. You wouldn’t want to leave your teeth behind.” Ramona felt she could run away without her old baby teeth, and she was hurt that her mother did not want to keep them to remember her by. She stood watching while her mother packed briskly and efficiently.

“You will want Ella Funt in case you get lonely,” said Mrs. Quimby.

When Ramona said her mother did not love her, she had no idea her mother would do a terrible thing like this. And her father.

Didn’t he care either? Apparently not. He was too busy scrubbing the bathroom to care that Ramona was in despair. And what about Beezus? She was probably secretly glad Ramona was going to run away because she could have her parents all to herself. Even Picky-picky would be glad to see the last of her.

As Ramona watched her mother fold underwear for her to take away, she began to understand that deep down inside in the place where her secret thoughts were hidden, she had never really doubted her mother’s love for her. Not until now. . . . She thought of all the things her mother had done for her, the way she had sat up most of the night when Ramona had an earache, the birthday cake she had made in the shape of a cowboy boot all frosted with chocolate with lines of white icing that looked like stitching.That was the year she was four and had wanted cowboy boots more than anything, and her parents had given her real ones as well. She thought of the way her mother reminded her to brush her teeth. Her mother would not do that unless she cared about her teeth, would she? She thought of the time her mother let her get her hair cut at the beauty school, even though they had to scrimp and pinch. She thought of the gentle books about bears and bunnies her mother had read at bedtime when she was little.

“There.” Mrs. Quimby closed the suitcase, snapped the latches, and set it on the floor. “Now you are all packed.” She sat down on the bed.

Ramona pulled her car coat out of the closet and slowly put it on, one arm and then the other. She looked at her mother with sad eyes as she grasped the handle of her suitcase and lifted. The suitcase would not budge. Ramona grasped it with both hands.

Still she could not lift it.

Hope flowed into Ramona’s heart. Had her mother made the suitcase too heavy on purpose? She looked closely at her mother, who was watching her.

She saw—didn’t she?—a tiny smile in her mother’s eyes.

“You tricked me!” cried Ramona. “You made the suitcase too heavy on purpose.

You don’t want me to run away!”

“I couldn’t get along without my Ramona,” said Ramona’s mother. She held out her arms. Ramona ran into them. Her mother had said the words she had longed to hear. Her mother could not get along without her. She felt warm and safe and comforted and oh, how good her mother smelled, so clean and sweet like flowers. Better than any mother in the whole world. Ramona’s tears dampened her mother’s blouse. After a moment Mrs. Quimby handed Ramona a Kleenex.When Ramona had wiped her eyes and nose, she was surprised to discover that her mother had tears in her eyes, too.

“Mama,” said Ramona, using a word she had given up as babyish, “why did you do that?”

“Because I could see I couldn’t get any-place arguing with you,” answered her mother. “You wouldn’t listen.”

The truth made Ramona uncomfortable.

“Why did Mrs. Rudge phone?” she asked, to change the subject.

Mrs. Quimby looked concerned. “She called to say that she had noticed you twitching your nose a lot—Daddy and I have noticed it, too—and she wondered if something was making you nervous. She wondered if you perhaps needed a shorter day in school.” And a longer day with Howie’s grandmother? What a terrible idea. “School is easy,” said Ramona, not mentioning spelling, which, after all, might be easy if she paid more attention to it.

“Have you any idea what makes you twitch your nose?” asked Mrs. Quimby gently. “I noticed you twitch it three times during breakfast.”

Ramona was surprised. Maybe she had twitched so much she could twitch without knowing it. “Of course I know why,” she said.“I was pretending I was a rabbit, a baby rabbit, because you call me a little rabbit sometimes.” This time Ramona did not mind when her mother laughed. She laughed a bit, too, to show that she now thought pretending to be a baby rabbit seemed silly, as if it were something she had done a long time ago when she was little.

“Rabbits are nice,” said Mrs. Quimby,“but I prefer a little girl. My little girl.”

“Really?” said Ramona, even though she knew her mother spoke the truth.

“I am glad to know you were a little rabbit,” said Ramona’s mother. “I was afraid my working full time might be too much for you, and just when we have decided Daddy will quit his job at the market and go back to school.” Ramona was astonished. “School! You mean do homework and stuff like that?

Daddy?”

“I expect so,” answered Mrs. Quimby.

“Why does he want to go and do a thing like that?” Ramona could not understand.

“To finish college,” her mother explained.

“So he can get a better job, he hopes. One that he likes.”

So this was what her parents had been talking about at night in their room. “Will he have to go away?” asked Ramona.

“No. He can go to Portland State right here in town,” explained Mrs. Quimby.“But I will have to go on working full time, which I want to do anyway because I like my job.

Do you think you can manage to get along with Mrs. Kemp?”

Ramona thought how much happier her family would be if her father never came home tired from working in the express line again. “Of course I can,” she agreed with courage. “I’ve gotten along—sort of—so far.” After this she would stay away from pinking shears and bluing. As for Willa Jean—maybe she would go to nursery school and learn to shape up. Yes, Ramona could manage.“And I guess we’ll have to scrimp and pinch some more,” she said.

“That’s right. Scrimp and pinch and save as much money as we can while Daddy is studying, even though he hopes to find part-time work after school starts,” said Mrs.

Quimby. “And by the way, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but I am curious.Why are your pajamas at school?”

“Oh.” Ramona made a face; it all seemed so ridiculous now. She gave her mother the shortest possible explanation.

Mrs. Quimby did not seem upset. She merely said, “What next?” and laughed.

“Did Mrs. Rudge say anything about my spelling?” Ramona hesitated to ask the question, but she did want to know the answer.

“Why, no,” said Mrs. Quimby. “She didn’t even mention spelling, but she did say you were one of her little sparklers who made teaching interesting.”And with that Ramona’s mother left the room.

A little sparkler! Ramona liked that. She thought of the last Fourth of July when she had twirled through the dusk, a sparkler fizzing and spitting in each hand and leaving circles of light and figure eights as she had spun across the front yard until she had fallen to the grass with dizziness.And now she was one of Mrs. Rudge’s little sparklers!

Ramona held out her arms and twirled across the room, pretending she was holding sparklers. Then she seized a pencil and paper that were lying on her bureau and wrote her name in good, bold cursive: There. A girl who was a sparkler needed a name that looked like a sparkler. And that was the way Ramona Quimby was going to write her name.

Ching-chong, ching-chong went the roller skates out on the sidewalk. Ramona opened the suitcase and pulled out her skates.