Sophie Hartley, On Strike

by Stephanie Greene

  “You’d better,” Mrs. Hartley called after him.

  “No fair!” said Sophie. “How come Thad’s allowed to clean his room whenever he wants and we aren’t?”

  “Because Mom has one standard for Thad and another one for you and me.” Nora buttoned the top button of the blouse she’d finished ironing and hung it beside her other clothes. “Don’t you know that by now?”

  “I do not,” said Mrs. Hartley.

  “You do, too,” said Nora. “If Thad’s in a bad mood, you get upset. But if Sophie or I am, you tell us to stop sulking. Thad never strips his bed. He always says ‘Not yet,’ and you let him get away with it. It’s called a double standard.”

  “That’s absolutely ridiculous.” Mrs. Hartley closed the refrigerator door so firmly that the jars on the shelves rattled.

  Sophie didn’t usually compare herself to Thad; he was six years older than she was. But she was glad to see that Nora’s superior tone annoyed her mother as much as it did her, and she was feeling ornery enough that the idea of ganging up on her mother made her feel better.

  “Nora’s right,” she said. “When Thad borrowed a pair of Dad’s underwear because he’d stuffed his dirty underwear under his bed, and then wrote his girlfriend’s name on the elastic, all you did was laugh. But when I drew a picture of a horse on the wall over my bed, you got mad.”

  Actually, they had all laughed the night Mr. Hartley pulled the elastic band of his boxer shorts above his belt at dinner to show them the words “Jaime Jaime Jaime,” written on it with little hearts in between.

  “It’s not at all the same thing,” her mother said testily.

  Nora raised her eyebrows and pressed her lips together. She didn’t say the word “transparent”; she looked it. For once, it wasn’t directed at Sophie. She was delighted.

  Mrs. Hartley was not.

  “I saw that, Nora!” she said. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! . . . Thad!” When his good-natured face appeared in the mudroom door, Mrs. Hartley said, “Go back upstairs and strip your bed this minute! I will not have my daughters accusing me of being a male chauvinist pig!”

  “Aw, Ma,” said Thad, “I’ve got a game.”

  “Now.” His mother pointed toward the stairs.

  “Thanks a lot, Nora.” Thad made a lunge for her on his way back through the kitchen, but Nora was too quick. She held the ironing board in front of her like a shield. Thad smacked it with his hand.

  “If I’m late, you’re going to suffer!” He pounded back up the stairs, shaking his hand in pain.

  “I’m getting sick and tired of having to argue about this every Saturday!” Mrs. Hartley said, banging pots and pans around on the stove as she spoke. “You’re a bunch of lazy children is what you are! I work all week and when I ask for a bit of help, all I get is guff! You know I’ve been working more hours since Dad’s strike. I have a good mind to turn all of the housekeeping over to you and see how you like it.”

  Her mother never stayed angry for long. Sophie knew the best thing to do would be to disappear and wait for it to blow over. But Nora and she hadn’t agreed on anything in so long, and they certainly hadn’t acted as a team. Sophie wanted to stick around to see what miracle might happen next.

  There was a sudden blast of loud music as Thad opened his bedroom door and yelled down, “Which ones are the sheets?”

  “Good grief,” said Mrs. Hartley. She shot a quick look at Nora and Sophie as if daring them to say a word, and went out into the hall.

  “What did I tell you?” said Nora, giving Sophie her look.

  “Am I expected to believe that that is a serious question?” their mother yelled.

  “I don’t know which ones they are,” Thad declared.

  Nora rolled her eyes.

  “For heaven’s sake, Thad,” said Mrs. Hartley. “The sheets! They’re the things you sleep on! You’re fifteen years old! I can’t believe what I’m hearing!”

  “Aw, man . . .” Thad disappeared back into his room again.

  “The pillowcase, too!” their mother shouted.

  Thad was in for it now, thought Sophie with delight. Their mother would have to agree with her and Nora. Maybe she’d make Thad change all the beds in the house for a few weeks, for practice.

  But when Mrs. Hartley came back into the kitchen, it was clear she wasn’t the least bit annoyed. If anything, she was amused.

  “‘Which ones are the sheets’. . .” she said to herself, and laughed.

  “You wouldn’t laugh if we asked you that question,” Sophie said.

  “Oh, Sophie, stop,” her mother said mildly. It was obvious that Thad had put her in a good mood, which made Sophie even grumpier. “I’m sick and tired of you both,” her mother went on. “Go find something to do before I find something for you.”

  Nora wiggled her eyebrows at Sophie behind their mother’s back, picked up her clothes, and left. Sophie knew better than to argue, so she got up and went into the family room. The Hartley children weren’t allowed to watch TV in the middle of the day, so she flung herself on the couch and crossed her arms tightly across her chest.

  It was no fair. Even when Thad asked dumb questions, he got away with it. And how did Nora do that thing with her face?

  Sophie got up and went into the downstairs bathroom to practice in front of the mirror. She wiggled her eyebrows and pushed her mouth into different shapes, but no matter how many different combinations she tried, she only managed to look as if she’d stepped into something soft and squishy.

  Barefoot.

  She had been at it for a matter of minutes when Thad came thundering back down the stairs. The lid of the washing machine banged, and Thad yelled, “I’m out of here!”

  “Did you do it?” called Mrs. Hartley.

  “Yep!”

  “Be home by five!”

  The back door slammed.

  Sophie was immediately suspicious. She couldn’t change her bed that fast, even when she didn’t change it. She bet Thad hadn’t touched his pillowcase.

  She marched down the hall to the laundry room to investigate and found that her mother was already there. Mrs. Hartley held Thad’s mattress pad in one hand and his blanket in the other. His sheets and plaid bedspread were piled up on the washing machine, with his pillow—still in its rumpled case—sitting on top.

  “I knew it!” Sophie cried. “He cheated!”

  She waited for her mother to explode, which Mrs. Hartley promptly did. She burst out laughing and stood looking from one piece of Thad’s bedding to the other, shaking her head. ‘“Which ones are the sheets?’” she said, and chuckled.

  To Sophie, it was the final straw.

  She was still brooding about it when her mother made her take out the garbage after dinner and she saw that the lid of the garbage can wasn’t on tight. She left it. It wasn’t her job, Sophie decided; it was Thad’s. Their mother never should have let him spend the night at his friend’s house after what he did. He could put it back on the right way in the morning if he was so wonderful.

  Trouble was, the raccoons got there first.

  Chapter Two

  None of them were up yet when Mrs. Hartley came downstairs the next morning and discovered garbage strewn all over the backyard.

  If they had been, they would have heard the back door slam and seen Mrs. Hartley jabbing at the buttons on the phone as she called Thad and told him to come home. If they’d seen her next, as she sat down at the kitchen table and started scribbling furiously on a large piece of paper, muttering to herself and occasionally laughing, they might have gotten a bit nervous.

  The first Nora and Sophie knew that anything was going on was when Mrs. Hartley came upstairs and opened their door.

  “Family meeting,” she said. “Kitchen. Five minutes. John, too.” Very terse and deadly calm, as if something horrible had happened.

  Or at least, that’s the way it sounded to Sophie, who was already awake. It had to be horrible for her mother to call a family meeting at seven thir
ty on a Sunday morning; even Nora didn’t grumble as they went across the hall to get John.

  They filed into the kitchen just as Thad came in through the back door. He went over to the sink to wash his hands.

  “Pee-euw,” said John, pinching his nostrils together as he climbed up on the phone book on his chair at the kitchen table. “I smell garbage.”

  “What you smell, John,” said Mrs. Hartley, in a voice that struck Sophie as eerily polite, “are old shrimp shells mixed with several-day-old chicken bones, some very-over-the-hill hamburger meat, and milk from the liners of Maura’s bottles. Oh, and there must have been quite a few disposable diapers scattered around, too. Right, Thad?”

  “With poop?” John said hopefully.

  Thad’s look darkened as he wiped his hands on his pants and sat down. “Thanks a lot, Sophie,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.

  “What’d she do?” said Nora.

  “Left the top off the garbage can.” Thad aimed a kick at Sophie’s shin under the table for emphasis.

  Sophie pushed her chair back in the nick of time. “It was your job,” she said.

  She checked over her shoulder to see if her mother was watching before she dared to kick Thad back. But Mrs. Hartley was acting strangely uninterested in them. She was pouring herself a mug of coffee and humming.

  “Yeah, but I let you (kick, miss) do it, and you blew it,” said Thad.

  “Let me do it?” (Another kick.)

  “You just couldn’t handle it.”

  “Handle it?” More than anything, Sophie wanted to wipe the smirk off Thad’s face. “In case you didn’t know, I did it on purpose.”

  “Did you hear that, Mom?” said Thad, raising his voice. He and Sophie went on waging their silent kicking match and rocking the table back and forth. It wasn’t nearly as much fun as it usually was, because Mrs. Hartley totally ignored them. She was buttering a piece of toast as slowly and carefully as if she were creating a piece of artwork.

  “For heaven’s sakes, Mom,” Nora said at last. “Would you please yell at them and get it over with? Some of us would like to go back to bed.”

  “Oh, I think we’re all a little tired of my yelling, don’t you?” Mrs. Hartley said in a bright, false voice as she turned around. She picked up her mug and her plate and came toward them, smiling cheerfully as she put them on the table along with a large piece of paper. “I know I am,” she added with a hearty laugh as she sat down.

  Something was very fishy. Sophie didn’t like it one bit.

  “After all,” their mother went on, “it doesn’t work, does it? I just say the same things over and over again until I’m sick of the sound of my own voice. No one pays any attention!” She looked at them encouragingly. “Admit it. You’re sick of hearing it, too, you poor dears.”

  Sophie was a little put off by this strange performance. She couldn’t remember her mother ever calling them “dears” before; it made them sound soft and cuddly, like bunny rabbits. But since her mother seemed to be heading in the right direction and Sophie wanted to encourage her, she said, “It’s not so bad if we cover our ears. Thad’s lucky. He uses his headphones.”

  “Sophie,” Thad and Nora said together. “Shut up.”

  When her mother laughed her hearty laugh again instead of getting mad at them for saying shut up, Sophie really became uneasy. Something was definitely going on.

  “Well, no one will have to suffer anymore,” said the fake Mrs. Hartley. “From now on, everyone will know exactly what they have to do, and when, without my having to say a word.”

  Then she turned over the piece of paper and dropped her bombshell: It was a carefully executed job list, complete with everyone’s name and what looked like a hundred jobs, all neatly laid out in boxes and rows. She would continue to do the laundry and the cooking, she informed them, but the rest of the household jobs would be divided up among them, so everyone would get to help.

  “It’s so much better that way, don’t you think?” she asked gaily.

  Sophie was torn between being glad everyone else was going to have to work and being appalled to see how many jobs they had to do, so she couldn’t think of an immediate answer.

  Mrs. Hartley didn’t seem to need one. Unload dishwasher . . . mop kitchen floor . . . vacuum living room . . . clean downstairs bathroom—the jobs would rotate on a weekly basis beginning next Saturday, she explained, so that “everyone will get to do everything!”

  She made it sound as though they were choosing which rides they wanted to go on at a theme park. John was the only one young enough to be deceived.

  “What about me?” he said. “I want jobs, too.”

  “Downstairs bathroom?” Thad shook his head. “I don’t do toilets.”

  “If girls can do toilets, so can boys,” said Sophie. She stopped and thought about exactly what a toilet was. “I don’t do toilets, either,” she declared.

  “Really, Mom,” Nora said in a reasonable voice. “Don’t you think you’re going a little bit overboard here? These are all your jobs.”

  “That was a good one, Nora,” Thad said later. The three of them had retreated to the family room. “Rubbing it in to Mom about the fact that she does all the work around the house.” He stretched out on the La-Z-Boy and put his arms behind his head. “That was really sweet.”

  “Don’t talk to me about sweet.” Nora hurled a pillow that narrowly missed his head. “You’re the one who got us into this.”

  “I didn’t do it, Sophie did.”

  “I did not.”

  “Don’t start that again,” Nora said.

  “John hardly has to do anything,” complained Sophie. She plunked down at one end of the couch. “Collecting insects isn’t a job. He loves insects.”

  Nora pulled her legs up under her in a neat lotus position at the other end. “Do you want to pick up spiders?” she said primly. “I don’t.”

  Mrs. Hartley had made John his own list. He was already wandering around the house with a small box, looking for insects. Dead or alive, spiders mostly, brought in on Mrs. Hartley’s flowers. He was going to let the live ones go outside, he told them, and coat the dead ones in clear nail polish and add them to his collection.

  He was acting as though the whole thing was a game, and kept running back to the kitchen to read his name on the new “Hartley Family Job List” taped to the side of the refrigerator.

  “And what about Maura?” said Sophie. “She doesn’t have to do anything.”

  “You’re really stretching it, Soph,” said Thad.

  “Well, it’s true,” Sophie said, kicking at the frame of the couch. “I don’t know why Mom didn’t just yell the way she usually does.”

  “Maybe she’s getting smarter,” Nora said.

  “Not a chance,” said Thad. “Take my word for it: By next weekend, this’ll be a thing of the past.”

  “It’d better be,” said Sophie.

  She was still smarting from Alice’s phone call the night before. It turned out that Alice’s mother had taken Alice and Jenna to the mall, where a new nail spa was offering nail polishing for only five dollars as part of its grand opening. It was a good thing there were only two of them, Alice told Sophie, or Mrs. Ireland wouldn’t have treated them.

  “It wasn’t such a good thing for me,” Sophie said in an injured voice.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Alice said quickly. “It would have been much more fun if you were there. Really.”

  Sophie sniffed. “Treated you to what?”

  “We both got our nails polished.” Alice couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice. “It was so cool.”

  “Jenna did?” Sophie was shocked. The Jenna she knew, who wore her older brothers’ cast-off high-tops and football jerseys to school? Who terrorized the boys on the playground when they played tag by bending their thumbs back, the way her brothers had taught her? “But she’s a tomboy!”

  “Not anymore,” said Alice. “Her grandmother’s here for a month. Sh
e said she’d take Jenna to Disney World if she starts acting more like a girl.”

  Jenna’s nails were red with white stars, Alice reported breathlessly, and her own were purple—until she went out into the sun. Then they became pale pink with sparkles.

  Sophie had stared glumly at her bitten nails the whole time Alice talked. It seemed to her Alice wasn’t trying very hard to hide the excitement in her voice when she told Sophie every tiny detail, and she only said twice that she wished Sophie could have been there.

  “It was so much fun,” said Alice. “We decided to take turns coming up with special things to do on Saturday from now on.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Jenna and me. Jenna’s turn is next Saturday. You have the Saturday after that.”

  It felt like an order; Sophie didn’t like it. She didn’t like it that Alice and Jenna had made up a new rule without asking her, either. It made their friendship feel lopsided. Like a three-legged table minus a leg.

  She had to hang up on Alice to get her to stop talking. But not before she made Alice promise she and Jenna wouldn’t go anywhere without Sophie next Saturday. One Saturday without her, and they were already making new rules. And now this, Sophie thought gloomily, turning her attention back to Nora and Thad.

  “I don’t know if you’re right,” Nora was saying. “Mom seemed pretty determined.”

  “What Mom seemed was demented,” Thad said firmly. “This has to blow over. As I said: I don’t do toilets.”

  Unfortunately, Mrs. Hartley was as good as her word.

  Not only did she not change her mind, but she convinced Mr. Hartley to go along with her. They had a long talk in their bedroom on Wednesday afternoon when he got home. Sophie put her ear to their door to try and hear what they were saying, but she couldn’t understand any of it. She thought her mother must have hypnotized him, though, because when they all sat down to dinner, her dad started talking in the same fake voice Mrs. Hartley had been using.