The Penderwicks on Gardam Street

by Jeanne Birdsall

  Batty pulled her wagon into Jane’s half of the room. There was more space for it on Skye’s side, but Skye would get upset if she knocked against anything, and Batty was still unsure about steering. And, in fact, one wagon wheel did get caught in a towel hanging from Jane’s bureau—and down tumbled a pile of laundry, including a pair of red-and-yellow-striped kneesocks.

  Sprawled on her bed, Jane looked up from the book she was reading, The Island of the Aunts. “So that’s where my soccer socks have been. Batty, you don’t happen to see the rest of my uniform anywhere, do you? We have a game tomorrow.”

  Batty was too sleepy to find a missing uniform in all that clutter. “Actually, I want you to tell me a story.”

  “I’m in the middle of a chapter. I could read the rest out loud to you.”

  “But I wouldn’t understand it.” Batty knew she was close to crying. She fought hard against it, but one tear managed to escape and roll down the side of her nose.

  “She’s going to cry,” said Skye.

  “I am not.” A second tear joined the first.

  Jane shut her book and patted the bed beside her. Batty gratefully clambered up.

  “Let me think of a story,” said Jane. “Oh, I know. Once upon a time—”

  “No Sabrina Starr,” interrupted Skye. “I couldn’t stand it. Not tonight.”

  “Sabrina Starr happens to be excellent for times of stress. That was not, however, what I had in mind. Once upon a time—”

  “And no Mick Hart, either.” Mick Hart was Jane’s soccer-playing alter ego, a rough-mouthed professional from England. During soccer season, Skye heard more than enough about him, as she shared not only a bedroom but also a soccer team with Jane.

  “I don’t care who you tell about,” said Batty.

  “Thank you, Batty. Onceuponatime”—Jane paused and looked at Skye, who shrugged and pointed her binoculars out the window—“there lived a king and queen who had three daughters, all princesses and greatly beloved by the people of their country.”

  “What was the country called?”

  “It was called Cameronlot. The oldest princess was beautiful and kind. The second princess was brilliant and fearless. And the third princess was a spinner of tales, a fountain of creativity, a paragon of discipline, and all of Cameronlot declared her the most fascinating and talented princess who had ever lived.”

  “Ahem,” said Skye from the window.

  Jane ignored her. “Still, the king and queen felt that something was missing from their lives. ‘We need just one more princess,’ said the queen. ‘One who…’”

  “One who what?” asked Batty, for Jane had stopped.

  “Why, one who can do what the other three princesses can’t.”

  “Like what?” This was Skye again, being not at all helpful.

  “She could understand the animals,” said Batty.

  “Yes, of course!” exclaimed Jane. “The king and queen needed a princess who could understand the animals, and so they had a fourth princess.”

  The door opened and Rosalind wandered in, looking as though she’d been staring into strange and unfamiliar places.

  “You’ve come back!” cried Batty, running to her.

  “And you’ve got leaves in your hair,” said Skye.

  Rosalind reached up and seemed surprised to find that, yes, she had leaves stuck to her curls. Nervously she plucked them out and let them drop to the floor.

  “Where have you been?” asked Jane.

  “I don’t know. Walking. And lying down, too, I guess.”

  It didn’t matter to Batty where Rosalind had been. What mattered was that now she was back. “Daddy read to me about Scuppers,” she said. “But then I wanted another story, and Jane was telling me one about princesses, but I want you to tell me one.”

  “All right, honey.” Rosalind sank down onto Skye’s bed. “In a minute.”

  Skye and Jane were also relieved to see Rosalind come home, leaves and all. She was the eldest—the dependable—Penderwick, and dependable people should rally their troops in times of difficulty. They shouldn’t run out of the house and slam the door. Right now, though, Rosalind didn’t seem to have much rallying in her. Jane decided she needed encouragement.

  “Your pineapple upside-down cake was delicious, Rosy.” Jane reached under her bed and pulled out a sticky-looking lump of paper napkin. “I snuck a piece up here for you.”

  “No, I couldn’t.” She shook her head vehemently, releasing one last stray leaf, then lapsed back into silence.

  Now Skye tried. “This is weird about Daddy, isn’t it?”

  “Weird?” snapped Rosalind. “That’s what you think, that Daddy going on dates is weird?”

  “You don’t?” Skye backed away from her sister’s ferocity.

  “Oh, it’s much worse than weird. What if he falls in love with one of these dates? We could end up with a…” Rosalind shuddered. She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence.

  “You mean a stepmother?”

  “A stepmother!” Jane had never considered such a thing.

  “Think of Anna,” said Rosalind.

  Rosalind’s friend Anna had a perfectly fine mother, but her father was forever getting married and divorced, then falling in love and doing it over again. It had happened so many times that Anna no longer bothered to keep track of her stepmothers. She called them all Claudia, after the first one.

  “Good grief,” protested Skye. “Daddy’s nothing like Anna’s father.”

  “I know.” Rosalind managed to look a bit ashamed.

  “Yikes!” said Jane suddenly. “Think of poor Jeffrey and that disgusting Dexter.”

  Jeffrey was the boy the sisters had met that summer on vacation. And Dexter was the man who’d dated and then married Jeffrey’s mother, the dreadful Mrs. Tifton. So disgusting—so truly awful—was Dexter that Jeffrey had chosen to go to boarding school in Boston rather than live with him.

  “What’s gotten into you two?” Skye was outraged, for her father’s honor was being trampled in the mud. “Now you’re comparing Daddy to Mrs. Tifton?”

  Batty had been trying to follow the conversation, but though she adored Jeffrey and loathed Mrs. Tifton as much as her sisters did, she couldn’t understand what either of them had to do with Daddy’s dating. Indeed, she was so tired she couldn’t understand much of anything. She felt like she could fall asleep right there, if only Rosalind would just tell her a story, even a little one. Maybe one about Mommy—that would be nice.

  “Rosalind, please,” she said.

  But Jane was talking again. “Skye’s right. Of course Daddy would never fall in love with anyone as horrible as Dexter, or, you know what I mean, Dexter if he was a woman.”

  “Much less horrible than Dexter can still be horrible,” said Rosalind.

  “Dexter, Schmexter,” said Skye. “I trust Daddy. And by the way, everyone seems to be forgetting that the dating was Mommy’s idea.”

  “I didn’t forget. Mommy was wrong.”

  “Rosalind!” Jane almost shrieked it. Their mother had never been wrong. They all knew that.

  “Well, she was.” Rosalind turned and stared out the window.

  Batty didn’t like any of this. She didn’t like that Rosalind didn’t seem to notice her, and she didn’t like the leaves—messing up Skye’s side of the room!—and she especially didn’t like hearing about Mommy being wrong. All she wanted now was to get back to Hound and her bed, and if Rosalind wasn’t going to go with her, she would have to go by herself. She tugged on her red wagon, but this time the wheel got caught on a pile of books, and when she tugged again, the whole wagon turned over and she couldn’t seem to pick it back up and now there were so many tears that Skye would see and know she was a coward—

  —and finally Rosalind had picked her up and hugged her and was murmuring sweet, loving apologies.

  “I just wanted a story,” sobbed Batty.

  “I know.” Waving good night to Skye and Jane, Rosalind carried
Batty back to her bed and tucked her in. Hound opened one eye to check, then, satisfied that Batty was in no danger, rolled over and went back to sleep.

  “My wagon,” said Batty, snuggling in among her stuffed animals.

  “I’ll go get it, and then we’ll have a story.”

  But by the time Rosalind returned with the wagon and parked it beside the bureau, her little sister was as fast asleep as Hound. “Sleep well, Battikins,” she whispered, then watched over her for a long time, just in case she woke up again, still wanting a story.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Tempers Lost

  THE NEXT DAY, while the rest of the family was eating lunch, Skye was alone in her room. She and Jane had a soccer game in an hour, and while Jane believed that a big meal was essential for victory, Skye believed in a glass of milk, a few bananas, and solitary contemplation.

  Their team was Antonio’s Pizza, their uniforms red and yellow, with ANTONIO’S and a slice of pizza on the back. This season Skye had been elected captain, surprising her family and herself, for the year before she’d had a little trouble with her temper. Actually, a lot of trouble. There was the time she called the referee a kumquat and the time she stomped on a water bottle, which exploded, drenching several parents, and the time—well, all that was behind her now, she hoped. So far this season she hadn’t lost her temper even once. The C on her jersey stood not just for Captain but for Calm, she’d decided, and she meant to keep it that way.

  Her routine before each game went like this: ten leg stretches, ten neck rolls, ten push-ups, thirty situps, reciting out loud the prime numbers up to 811—this was for concentration—then five minutes of picturing the other team bloody and repentant. After that came the most difficult part of the routine—five minutes of positive thoughts. Her father had suggested that she add this to the rest, particularly on those days when she’d done an extra-good job of picturing blood and repentance. Balance is always good, he’d said. Skye agreed with him about balance, but somehow it always seemed to take her at least fifteen minutes to get in five minutes’ worth of positivity. Maybe today would be different.

  The leg stretches, neck rolls, push-ups, sit-ups, and prime numbers went well. And the five minutes with the other team zipped by, for Antonio’s Pizza was going to be playing their greatest rival, Cameron Hardware. And since the Cameron Hardware captain was the annoying Melissa Patenaude, who was in Skye’s class at school, and always giggling at their teacher, Mr. Geballe, she had all the more motivation to overwhelm them with a glorious victory.

  “Annihilation and humiliation for Cameron Hardware,” she said when she was done, lingering happily on an image of Melissa vanquished.

  Now it was positive-thought time. What should she think about? Before the last game, she’d been able to look forward to Aunt Claire’s visit, and if it had turned out to be a normal visit, she would right now be having positive thoughts about it. But instead, there was all this baloney about dates—and Daddy’s first one that very night!—which, while strange and confusing, shouldn’t make people go wacko, especially if they are the oldest sister and—

  “Stop!” Skye told herself. Positive thoughts!

  She could think about school. Other than having to sit behind Melissa, school was great. Mr. Geballe was letting her spend math class in the library teaching herself geometry, since she already knew all the sixth-grade material so well she could have taught it herself. In English, he was letting them read whatever they wanted, and she’d picked Swallows and Amazons, which was all about adventures with boats. Of course, there was that problem with history class, for Mr. Geballe was making them each write a play about the Aztecs. Skye would have been happy to write an essay about the Aztecs’ mathematical systems, or even their crops. But a play! With characters and drama and a plotline! She didn’t have even a glimmer of interest in any of that, and that idiot Melissa was already bragging about how she was almost finished writing her play and how great it was.

  “Stop!” Frustrated, Skye checked the clock. She had to come up with four more minutes of positivity.

  Then she got it. This past summer at Arundel. Now, those would be positive thoughts. She leaned back against the bed, and away she went, into the Arundel woods and gardens—two-on-one slaughter with Jeffrey and Jane, shooting arrows at pictures of Dexter, climbing out of Jeffrey’s window and into that huge tree, then getting rescued from the huge tree by Cagney, and on and on she thought, and was quite proud of herself, for the next time she looked at the clock, she’d managed to have the entire five minutes of positive thoughts, and so efficiently that there was time left before she had to suit up. She could give herself a treat, and knew exactly what treat she wanted—to try out her new binoculars by the light of day.

  A moment later, with her binoculars slung around her neck, Skye climbed out through her bedroom window and onto the garage roof. This was her special place. It was also sort of a secret place, meaning that though all her sisters knew she came out here, her father didn’t. Neither did Aunt Claire or any of the babysitters who’d taken care of the Penderwicks over the years. Skye knew that adults wouldn’t approve of sitting on roofs, even roofs only one story up, so she hadn’t told any of them. And her sisters hadn’t told on her. Penderwicks didn’t do that to each other.

  She settled on the shingles, raised the binoculars, and focused them. Wow. They were truly great binoculars. With them she could see details all up and down Gardam Street. There at one end of the street were the ivy leaves painted on the Corkhills’ mailbox, and there at the other end a license plate—NTRPRS—on a green car parked in the cul-de-sac.

  “Double wow. Triple wow,” she said, and pointed the binoculars directly across the street at the Geigers’ house.

  The Geigers—Mr. and Mrs. Geiger, Nick, and Tommy—had lived in that house for as long as the Penderwicks had lived in theirs, and Skye had looked at it a million times, but she’d never seen it through binoculars before. There, suddenly so close Skye almost reached out to touch it, was the scar on the garage door where Tommy had crashed his bike three years ago. And the soccer ball Jane had kicked onto the roof—she could read J. L. PENDERWICK THIS IS MY BALL—was still resting precariously in the gutter. And there was the rhododendron Nick had backed the car over when he was first learning to drive last year. Mrs. Geiger had been doing her best to nurse that bush back to health, but it didn’t look like it was going to make it.

  Now here came someone rounding the corner of the house at top speed—Tommy, wearing shoulder pads and his football helmet. Skye tried to focus the binoculars on him, but he was gone around the house again before she could, his long legs and arms flailing at top speed. Training. He was always in training. Running. Lifting weights. Doing drills. Rosalind said that if he had as much discipline with his schoolwork as he did with football, he’d be at the top of the seventh grade. Here he came again.

  “Skye, five minutes until we have to suit up for the game.” It was Jane, leaning out the window. “Annihilation and humiliation for Cameron Hardware. How did your positive thoughts go?”

  “Good. Now go away, I’m still being alone.”

  Skye looked across the street again. Tommy was nowhere in sight, and though she waited for a few minutes, he didn’t reappear. He was probably doing squat thrusts somewhere. Tommy loved squat thrusts.

  She pointed her binoculars up into the sky, for she’d heard a flock of Canada geese honking their way across Cameron. There they were—she focused—

  “Hey.”

  What was the good of a special secret place if everyone kept visiting her there? This time it was Tommy, not doing squat thrusts after all, but instead perched in the tree that grew behind the garage. He was still wearing his helmet. It looked pretty goofy in a tree.

  “Go away,” she said.

  “Do you want to do some football drills?”

  “No, I’ve got a soccer game.”

  “What about Rosalind?”

  “She’ll be watching the game. The whole f
amily’s going, because Aunt Claire’s here.”

  “Do you think she’ll want to later? Rosalind, I mean, not Aunt Claire. I mean, I’m sure Aunt Claire could do football drills if she wanted to, but I’d rather have Ros—I mean…”

  Tommy had trailed off into an embarrassed silence. Skye aimed the binoculars at him. All she got was a gigantic blurry nose inside a football helmet. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing.” But the blurry nose was turning red.

  “Hail ye, god of the goalposts.” It was Jane again. “How’s the Russian going?”

  Tommy was studying Russian in school. It was the first of many languages he planned to learn, for he was going to be a pilot when he grew up, and thought he should be able to speak properly with people everywhere he flew.

  “Not bad. Neplokho,” said Tommy.

  “Oh, that’s lovely,” said Jane. “Skye, it’s time.”

  “Right.” Skye slithered along the roof and dropped back into the bedroom.

  “What was Tommy doing in the tree?”

  “Being peculiar,” said Skye. “Let’s suit up.”

  For the first half of the game nothing could bother Skye, not even Melissa’s phoney “Good luck” during the captains’ handshake. It was a warm, bright September afternoon, gorgeous with color—green grass, blue sky, and red-and-yellow uniforms (and purple-and-white, for anyone who cared about Cameron Hardware)—like a crayon box come to life. The teams were evenly matched enough to make it interesting, but not so much that Antonio’s Pizza couldn’t pull ahead, and did, mostly because of Jane. Always a quick and wily striker, today she was on fire. By halftime, she’d scored two of their team’s three goals. Cameron Hardware had scored none. Antonio’s Pizza spent the whole halftime doing a wild war dance of joy, sort of a hip-hop version of the hula, with a touch of the cancan thrown in. Skye was delighted with herself, her sister, her team, and life. They were winning, and she hadn’t felt even the least little bit of temper.