The Penderwicks in Spring

by Jeanne Birdsall

  When you’re not yet eleven years old and not very large yourself, a toddler being hauled from a crib feels like a ton of lead. But with Lydia’s arms and legs wrapped around her, Batty could just manage it. That was only the first struggle, though, because as soon as Lydia was set down, she dashed into the corner to grab a golden crown from her toy shelf. Batty dove after her and there was a brief and undignified tug-of-war, which Lydia won by refusing to let go.

  “If you have to wear the crown, okay,” said Batty, defeated, “but just stop talking about princesses.”

  On went the crown. It had been a gift from Aunt Claire, the family’s favorite relative, and someone who should have known better, and had known better throughout the childhoods of the original set of sisters. But since then, she and her husband, Turron, had produced twin boys, Marty and Enam, whose energy and enthusiasm for life seemed to have rattled Aunt Claire’s common sense. The crown wasn’t the only thing. Tutus also arrived at irregular intervals. Mr. Penderwick had been heard threatening to retaliate with drum sets for Marty and Enam, but Iantha always calmed him down.

  Still, a crown and tutus do not a princess mania make, so Aunt Claire couldn’t be assigned all the blame. While Batty was certain that princesses couldn’t ruin a life, as the senior member of the younger Penderwick siblings, she felt responsible for the honor and dignity of all three. Ben had many talents and not just with rocks, and Batty planned to become a professional pianist, but who could tell with Lydia? So far she was dragging down the team.

  “La-la-la-la-la-la kiss, kiss,” sang Lydia.

  “Also no kissing,” said Batty. “Where are your shoes?”

  Lydia found her shoes in the corner, buried under one of the tutus, and brought them to Batty.

  “Outside?” she asked, lifting one foot at a time to receive its shoe.

  “Yes, outside. Let’s go look for signs of spring.”

  HOLDING HANDS, Batty and Lydia went out into the spring sunshine. Across their street—Gardam Street—Mrs. Geiger’s first daffodil glowed proudly among a smattering of purple hyacinths and white crocuses. But what Lydia noticed first was the family car parked in the driveway and, in the driver’s seat, the third-oldest Penderwick sister. This was sixteen-year-old Jane, and she was reading a book propped up on the steering wheel.

  Lydia broke into a run, clutching at her crown to keep it from tumbling off.

  “Snow White is dead!” she shouted to Jane.

  “The prince will kiss her awake!” Jane threw open the car door and swung Lydia up onto her lap, covering her with kisses.

  “You know we agreed not to encourage her,” said Batty when she caught up.

  “Sorry,” answered Jane, but she snuck in a few more princely kisses anyway.

  On the passenger’s seat of the car was a stack of books—the one that Jane had been reading, plus a dozen others. This was typical for Jane, who wanted to be a published author someday and believed that the only way to learn how to write was to read, read, read. So she was always in the middle of at least one book and felt safe only if she had several more on standby. Tucked into her stack was also a blue notebook, the kind Jane used for writing down ideas that came to her, bits and pieces of conversations she’d heard, anything she thought she might write about one day. Batty figured that by now Jane had filled dozens of these blue notebooks—most of them kept in boxes under her bed.

  Lydia pointed at the book on top of the pile. “Lydia wants story.”

  “That one’s in French,” said Jane. “You wouldn’t understand. Even I can’t understand it without looking up most of the words.”

  “Oui.” Lydia had picked up a few words from Jane, and was proud of herself for it.

  “All right, but just a little bit. This is by a man named Dumas, who wrote about hopeless passion and bitter revenge—” Jane paused. “You’re probably too young for the details. Just listen. ‘Une belle jeune fille aux cheveux noirs comme le jais, aux yeux veloutés comme ceux de la gazelle—’ ”

  Batty let the words wash over her, understanding nothing. Life would have been easier, she thought, if Skye and Jane had followed Rosalind and their dad into Latin. Skye had started on that path, taking Latin in seventh grade, but she soon tired of being compared unfavorably to Rosalind—Mr. Smith’s favorite Latin student ever—and switched to Spanish. After that, Jane didn’t even attempt Latin, instead studying French, because it was “romantic.” Lydia was able to pick up words from all three languages, but the polyglot confusion had the opposite effect on Batty. She hoped to avoid studying any languages, except maybe Italian, because so many of the notations on her piano scores were in that language.

  But now Lydia, bored with Dumas, kicked over Jane’s stack of books, and when Jane stopped reading so that she could stack them up again, Batty asked her why she was sitting in the car. It wasn’t, after all, the most comfortable place to read a book.

  “I’m letting it rest. I thought I heard a strange noise, and then I thought that the noise might stop after the car rested a little. Here, you take Lydia and I’ll drive—you tell me if you hear anything. It could be my imagination.” Jane said this part about her imagination with eager optimism. The car was old and already beset by many minor injuries. Another could send it to its grave.

  As soon as Jane backed the car down the driveway, Batty heard the noise, actually three noises—a simultaneous squeal and moan, followed by a thunk.

  “I heard it!” she called to Jane.

  “Are you sure? I’ll drive it forward again.”

  The noise was the same with the car going forward, and even Lydia said so, but Jane drove it back and forth several more times, hoping that if her sisters wouldn’t agree about the noise being her imagination, maybe it would get bored with itself and disappear.

  “Now it’s getting louder,” said Batty.

  Loud enough even to summon Ben out of the backyard, his curiosity stronger than his desire to find buried riches. He’d picked up even more mud since Batty saw him last, which she’d thought impossible.

  “Ben, Ben, Ben!” Lydia tried to dive out of Batty’s arms, but Batty held on tightly, keeping her away from Ben and his dirt. One filthy Penderwick was plenty.

  “What’s Jane doing?” he asked.

  “Hoping that noise will go away.”

  THUNK! It was the loudest one yet, but the cry from Jane was louder still.

  “Now it’s stuck!” She was fiddling with levers and pedals, but the car wouldn’t move at all, either forward or backward.

  “At least the noise stopped,” said Ben.

  “That’s not necessarily a good thing.” Jane frowned. “Better go get Skye.”

  Ben went inside to yank Skye out of her world of mathematics. When she arrived, blinking in the sunshine, she switched places with Jane and did more fiddling. But the car wouldn’t move for her, either.

  “I’ve killed it, haven’t I,” said Jane. “Le morte d’auto.”

  “It’s at least gravely wounded.” Skye got out again and looked under the hood. Everyone looked with her, but nothing in there was obviously broken.

  “I think the sound came from beneath the car,” said Batty.

  “Maybe a big stick got caught underneath,” said Ben. That had happened once to his best friend Rafael’s car, and Ben secretly hoped to observe it sometime for himself.

  “I don’t think so.” But now Skye scooted under the car and everyone followed her, even Lydia, who thought they were playing a game made up just for her.

  “Snow White is dead,” she said, wriggling happily. “Lydia loves Skye.”

  “You can’t suck me into your princess stuff,” said Skye. “I’ll tell you instead about telescopes that find stars so old they existed almost at the beginning of the universe. Isn’t that more exciting than princesses?”

  “Crown!” said Lydia. It had slid off her wild red curls.

  “It’ll stay on if you don’t wriggle so much.” Batty grabbed the crown and crammed it back on.


  “Skye, what should we do about the car?” Jane asked.

  “Because there’s no big stick under here.” Ben had looked carefully.

  Skye sighed. “I guess it’s time to call Dad with the bad news.”

  So Skye called Mr. Penderwick, who called Ernie’s Service Station, who agreed to send a tow truck for the car.

  The excitement created by the arrival of the large red tow truck, with its brute strength, broad straps, boom, and clanking chains, kept the younger Penderwicks from thinking about consequences. But once the car had been dragged away, thoughts turned to what its brokenness meant for the family. They owned one more vehicle, an old and ungainly clunker nicknamed Van Allen, but that wouldn’t be enough to handle so many people who needed to go in so many different directions at all different times. If the car was truly dead, another one would have to be bought.

  “Are cars expensive?” Ben asked Batty.

  “I think so.”

  He eyed Lydia speculatively. “Maybe we could make money by renting her out to lonely families.”

  “But since it would be Lydia being rented out, the money would be hers and she’d want to use it for more crowns and tutus.”

  “Lydia, you’d give me any money you made, right?” asked Ben.

  “Sí,” she agreed.

  “And I’d give it to Dad and Mom,” he said. “Do you think they’d let us do it?”

  Since the Penderwicks weren’t the kind of family to rent out children, Ben didn’t bother to wait for an answer, but returned to the backyard in search of buried valuables. When Lydia tried to follow him, Batty took her to the front steps, a good place to sit when looking for spring and, because the afternoon was almost gone, to wait for their parents to come home.

  “Lydia, do you see Mrs. Geiger’s first daffodil?” She pointed across the street.

  “Purple flower,” said Lydia.

  “No, that’s a hyacinth. I mean the yellow one.”

  “Lydia likes purple. So does Tzina.”

  Tzina was one of Lydia’s friends from day care, and was often brought into discussions as an authority. So, Batty thought, purple it was.

  From overhead came a familiar chorus. Batty leaned back to look—yes, it was a V-shaped flock of Canada geese. They could be coming up from the south, or maybe it was one of the flocks that lived in Massachusetts all year long, making their way from one feeding ground to another. Batty had always thrilled to their honking, haunting cries. As had Hound. They would race together across the yard, trying to keep up with the big birds traveling on the wind, and afterward, when the birds were gone, Batty would imitate their call, ahaawln haawln, and Hound would lick her face—

  “Goldie put Frank in a box,” said Lydia.

  Batty came back into the present. “Hmm?”

  “Goldie put Frank in a box.”

  The part about Goldie made sense—she ran Lydia’s day care. But who Frank was and why Goldie would put him into a box was beyond understanding. Batty had learned long ago that asking Lydia direct questions rarely got results. It was best to go roundabout and hope they ended up at the truth.

  “What kind of box?” she asked.

  Lydia thought hard. “Blue.”

  “Did he like being in there?”

  This was the wrong question. Lydia’s lower lip started to quiver, and Batty—not for the first time—wished that Lydia had put off talking until she could make sense, like when she was five or six. And now she was crying.

  “I’m sorry,” said Batty helplessly. “I don’t know who Frank is.”

  “He died and Goldie put him in a box and Lydia couldn’t kiss him.”

  With this, Batty could be reasonably certain that Frank wasn’t one of the children at the day care. She went over the names of the animals living there: Leon the Madagascar hissing cockroach, Baloney the hamster, and—oh, dear—Francis the guinea pig, aka Frank. And now she remembered that Lydia had talked about loving Frank a lot, especially when compared to Leon.

  “I know that’s sad, but you really shouldn’t kiss guinea pigs, even when they’re alive.” Batty pulled Lydia onto her lap. “Come on, I’ll sing a song for you.”

  Except for Batty, the Penderwick family wasn’t much for singing. Not because they wouldn’t have liked to, but because they couldn’t carry tunes, and so sounded—as Mr. Penderwick had once said after they’d all sung “Happy Birthday” to someone or other—like a flock of depressed sheep.

  However, Batty could not only carry a tune, she sounded nothing like a sheep, even one in a good mood, so she sang often to Lydia. Today she started with “Swinging on a Star,” one of Lydia’s favorites—full of moonbeams and a funny-looking mule—and soon Lydia’s crying slowed down. But Batty had forgotten that in a later verse the mule was replaced by a pig, and since the pig reminded Lydia of guinea pigs, the crying got worse again. Batty quickly changed to another favorite, “A Ram Sam Sam,” which had a little hand dance to go along with it. But Lydia’s crying had already taken on a life of its own, and even the joy of wiggling her fingers to “guli guli guli guli guli” couldn’t stop it now.

  Thus it was a very good thing when Van Allen pulled into the driveway a few minutes later.

  “Lydia, look!” said Batty. “Mom’s home. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  For Lydia, the arrival of her mother meant another person to help with her mourning. As Iantha climbed down out of Van Allen, Lydia reached out imploring arms.

  “Crisis?” Iantha called to Batty.

  “Sort of, yes, please!”

  Iantha was a calm mother who didn’t believe in adding to the chaos of woe. Smiling, she came to the girls, managing somehow to hug Batty and scoop up Lydia simultaneously. As Lydia sobbed about boxes and kisses, Batty tried to present a logical version of the Frank-the-dead-guinea-pig story. It was one of Iantha’s many skills that she could listen to lots of people speaking at the same time and still get hold of the important parts. She’d explained once that it was because she was a scientist—an astrophysicist—and therefore had to take in opposing views, but Batty didn’t think that was it. Skye was planning to become an astrophysicist, too, and she wasn’t particularly good at listening to even a single person at a time. Maybe she would learn that when she went away to college next year.

  “Thank goodness she didn’t kiss Frank,” Iantha said when Batty finished. “I would’ve had to write Goldie a note about germs, and I’m really not that kind of parent. And how was your day, Batty?”

  “Good.” Except for finding Hound’s bone, and Batty didn’t want to talk about that.

  Now came a redoubling of Lydia’s sobs—she’d heard germs as worms, which reminded her that her friend Jordy had said that dead guinea pigs were eaten by worms—and Iantha thought it best to take her inside and give her a snack.

  The sun had shifted, and shadows crawled across the front steps. Batty shivered in the sudden chill but stayed where she was, waiting for her father to arrive. He would be home soon and here was a rare chance to have him to herself, even for just a few minutes. She drove away the shivers by humming the Bach prelude she’d been practicing for that evening’s piano lesson, her fingers energetically playing along on an imaginary piano.

  She hadn’t long to wait. Her father arrived before she ran out of Bach, dropped off by a colleague—a botany professor, like Mr. Penderwick—whose car wasn’t broken. Batty ran over to help with the large cooler being lifted out of the car. She knew that this contained plant samples collected from the field. Her dad was always happiest when he’d been out collecting real plants instead of just talking about them in a lecture hall.

  “Ah, one of my many daughters. But which one?”

  “The best one,” she answered. It was one of their jokes. “Daddy, your glasses.”

  “Whoops.” They were dangling precariously from the cooler handle. He rescued them before they smashed onto the ground, and put them in his pocket.

  “Wouldn’t it be simpler if you just wore them?”
r />   “That’s the theory,” he said cheerfully.

  They carried the cooler to the front steps and opened it, so that she could see the bits of plants he’d carefully trimmed from their hosts and stored in plastic bags. Each was marked with the exact location of the host plant, including latitude and longitude readings. He’d let Batty and Ben play with the portable GPS he used to get those readings, and they both knew the exact location of their home: latitude 42.320529, longitude -72.632236. Ben liked to give that as his address instead of Gardam Street, Cameron, Massachusetts, but Batty considered that showing off.

  “What plant is this?” she asked, pointing to a slender twig with small, dangling, white bell-shaped flowers.

  “Chamaedaphne calyculata,” he said. “Or leather-leaf, which doesn’t sound as glamorous, does it? The leaves contain poison, though according to some, rabbits eat it.”

  “I wouldn’t like for a rabbit to be poisoned.”

  “Nor would I, but they know how to take care of themselves out there.” Mr. Penderwick closed the cooler. “And what’s your news today?”

  “Well, the car. Is it badly hurt?”

  “Afraid so. Ernie already took a look and declared it dead on arrival.”

  “Oh, Daddy.”

  “Don’t ‘Oh, Daddy’ me. Cars aren’t your worry. What other news?”

  “Ben found a hinge that wasn’t gold and Lydia is upset because she wasn’t allowed to try mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a dead guinea pig.”

  “That’s everyone else. What about Batty? Today is Thursday, so piano lesson tonight. Are you prepared?”

  “Of course.” He knew she was always ready for anything to do with music. She’d been practicing the Prelude and Fugue no. 9 in E Major until she could play it in her sleep.

  “How about homework?”

  Homework was a different story. At first she couldn’t remember if she had any.

  “We’re supposed to learn the different kinds of clouds,” she answered finally.

  “I can help with that. In Latin, cumulus means ‘heap’ or ‘pile,’ so those are the big fluffy clouds, and cirrus means ‘ringlet of hair,’ so those are the wispy ones. Logical.”