The Penderwicks on Gardam Street

by Jeanne Birdsall

  “Woof,” he said sadly.

  “Poor Hound,” said Batty.

  “Poor Hound, indeed.” Mr. Penderwick was not sympathetic. “Even he should know not to eat towels. Now, as for dinner, I’ve ordered pizzas, which should arrive in about forty-five minutes. I’ve already told the babysitter that I’m leaving the money for the deliveryman on the kitchen counter.”

  “Babysitter!” exclaimed all the sisters at once. This was a terrible shock. Now that Rosalind was in charge in the afternoons, surely she could handle evenings, too.

  “Yes, babysitter,” said Mr. Penderwick cheerfully, just as the front doorbell rang. “Here he is now.”

  Jane opened the front door. There stood Tommy, with a football tucked under his arm.

  “Why, Tommy, what a pleasant surprise,” said Jane. “But where’s your helmet tonight?”

  “I decided it looked, you know, goofy,” he answered, looking past her. “Hi, Rosalind.”

  “You’re the babysitter? You?” The blow to Rosalind’s dignity was too great.

  “No, I am.” An older version of Tommy—with the same long arms and legs, the same unruly hair and big smile—stepped out from behind him, holding yet another football.

  “Nick,” said Rosalind bitterly. Tommy’s older brother as a babysitter wasn’t as humiliating as Tommy himself, but still she wasn’t happy.

  “Coach Geiger, if you please.” Nick picked up Batty and hoisted her, squealing happily, high above his head.

  “Daddy, if Nick’s in charge, he’ll make us to do football drills,” said Skye. Nick wanted to be a coach when he grew up and was always practicing on anyone he could get hold of.

  “If I can go on a date with Anna’s skating coach, you can do a few football drills.”

  “More than a few, I think,” said Tommy.

  “I’m working on a new passing pattern that I want to test out,” said Nick. “You told me I could push the girls hard, Mr. Pen.”

  “So I did. Push them hard and promise me you’ll never get suckered into a date.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “But, Daddy!” Rosalind had planned a quiet evening of baking almond cookies and talking to Anna on the phone. The Geiger brothers and their footballs would ruin all that.

  “I have spoken,” said Mr. Penderwick. He made a quick round of his daughters for good-bye hugs, then left.

  “‘I have spoken’?” Jane appealed to the others. “Since when does Daddy say things like that?”

  “He’s not himself,” said Skye. “I tell you he’s being pushed too close to the edge.”

  “Oh, Skye, stop!” said Rosalind.

  Nick put Batty down and ruffled her curls. “Time for the drills. Outside, everyone. Assistant Coach Geiger, you know what to do.”

  Tommy pulled a whistle out from under his shirt and blew a sudden, sharp blast on it. Rosalind clapped her hands over her ears, giving Tommy so withering a look it was astonishing he didn’t perish right there on the spot.

  “You—you—oaf!”

  “Rosalind!” Jane was astonished that Rosalind would say such a thing. Penderwicks never called a friend an oaf, especially when the friend was Tommy Geiger, who in Jane’s opinion could never be close to oafish.

  But Rosalind wasn’t done. She stomped her foot angrily, and when even that wasn’t enough to express the depth of her annoyance, she ran upstairs.

  “What did I do?” asked Tommy, staring woefully after her.

  “You didn’t do anything. She’s fine,” said Jane. “Let’s start the drills.”

  Skye wasn’t so sure that Rosalind was fine. She never called people names and stomped her foot. Losing tempers was Skye’s job—Rosalind was supposed to be the imperturbable Penderwick. Someone needed to check on her, and though Jane was the best one for talking about emotions, she and Batty had already followed the Geiger brothers outside. The only one left was Hound, still too sick for football drills. Skye prodded him with her foot, but he just sighed and looked pathetic. He was no help. Skye was on her own.

  She marched resolutely upstairs and found Rosalind in her room, leafing through a Latin-English dictionary.

  “What did Daddy say in Latin, Skye? Mendax, mendax—?”

  Skye was relieved. Latin was easier than feelings. “Mendax, mendax, bracae tuae con—something.”

  “Conflagrant, I think,” said Rosalind, flipping pages. “I’ll start with mendax. M-e-n-d-a-x. It means liar. Daddy called me a liar!”

  “You’d just told him his tie looked great.”

  “Oh, right. Let me look up the rest of it. Okay, bracae is next. It means ‘trousers’ or ‘breeches.’ Tuae I already know—it means ‘your.’ And conflagrant is a verb form, I’m pretty sure. Yes, here it is. Conflagrare. ‘To burn.’” Rosalind shook the dictionary as if it were malfunctioning. “That couldn’t be right. ‘Liar, liar, your trousers are burning’? What does that mean?”

  It means Daddy’s going wacko and it’s our fault, Skye almost said, but she stopped herself. She was here to make sure Rosalind was all right, not get her more upset. There must be something soothing to say. Skye started out tentatively. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe we got the Latin wrong. Or”—she had a sudden inspiration—“maybe the stuff Daddy’s been saying all these years never made any sense, and we just didn’t know it. Just forget about the mendax thing.”

  “You really think I should?”

  “Yes,” answered Skye firmly, and proudly, too, for it wasn’t often that Rosalind asked her for advice.

  Rosalind flopped onto her bed and stared mournfully at the ceiling. “I guess I shouldn’t have called Tommy an oaf.”

  “Well, it’s just Tommy.”

  “I know.”

  Rosalind sank into a reverie, and Skye wandered around the room, vaguely aware that something was different. Had Rosalind moved furniture around? No. And she still had the same plaid curtains and bedspread she’d always had. Then Skye realized that it wasn’t that something had changed. It was that something was missing—a framed photograph of their mother holding Rosalind when she was still a tiny baby.

  “Rosy, where’s Mommy’s picture?” It was always by Rosalind’s bed. She’d even taken it with her to Arundel that summer.

  Rosalind flushed. “It’s in my drawer.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t want to look at it right now.”

  Skye stopped herself from asking why again. She’d done all right with the emotional stuff so far, and she didn’t want to ruin it now. Besides, there was a lot of shouting in the backyard, which meant the football drills were under way. Skye poked gently at her older sister.

  “I’m hungry, and you know Nick won’t let us eat until we throw around his football.”

  “Right.” Rosalind reluctantly got off the bed. “Let’s get this over with.”

  No matter how much any of the sisters complained about Nick and his football drills, somehow every fall they ended up doing them, even without the pizza incentive. And it wasn’t just football. In the winter, he put them through basketball drills—and they complained about that just as much. And one summer it had been the Gardam Street Softball Camp—he’d even managed to make them pay for that with quarters skimmed off their allowances, though they protested the whole time that they hated softball drills even more than football and basketball drills.

  Maybe they put up with it all because Rosalind had turned into one of the best girls’ basketball players in her school, and could outshoot most of the boys, too, when it came to that. And Skye was a decent softball pitcher and a much more than decent hitter. And when Skye and Jane had first started playing soccer, Nick taught himself the skills he needed to help them with that, too, though he’d never cared about soccer before and had even been known to call it ice hockey without the ice or the excitement. And all the Penderwicks knew what good soccer players Skye and Jane were now.

  Only Batty had not yet shown any marked improvement from being trained by Nick, but Nick wa
sn’t giving up on her. Though no one else could see it, he insisted that she had the makings of a great athlete.

  “Batty, don’t duck and cover your head when Jane throws the ball to you!” he was shouting when Rosalind and Skye ran outside. “Stretch up and try to catch it!”

  “Okay,” she said, and did manage to stretch up this time, though long seconds after the ball had flown over her head. “Rosalind, look! I’m playing football!”

  Without turning around, Nick barked, “Rosalind, Skye, five laps around the house for being late!”

  “I’m too hungry for laps,” protested Skye.

  “Make that six laps. Assistant Coach Geiger, you know what to do!”

  When Tommy blew his whistle—softly this time, and pointed away from Rosalind—the girls took off around the yard. Skye got hungrier and more annoyed with each lap, but the exercise seemed to cheer up Rosalind. She cheered up more when the laps were over and she joined the drills, especially after tackling Tommy and knocking him down. She didn’t even lose her good mood when Tommy tackled her back and knocked her down, though Nick made them each do ten squat thrusts for it, since they were supposed to be doing drills for passing, not tackling.

  He’d worked them through some standard pass patterns, and had just moved on to his own personal creation—the do-si-do, with lots of weaving, spinning, and fake hand-offs—when a new player suddenly appeared, a streak of orange flying after the ball that Jane had just fumbled. Tommy blew the whistle, and everyone stopped to watch as Asimov the cat dove onto the ball, bringing it to a stop.

  “Interference,” said Jane, not pleased that a cat was a better ball handler than she was.

  “Who’s this?” asked Nick.

  “He lives next door,” said Batty, crouching down to stare curiously at Asimov, who stared just as curiously back.

  “I’ll take him home before Hound realizes he’s here,” said Skye. She was by now hungry enough to do anything to get out of the drills, even pick up Asimov.

  “Hound’s in the house,” said Nick.

  “He could bust out through a window if he smells cat,” she improvised. “Really, Nick, this is an emergency.”

  Before Nick could come up with another argument, Skye scooped up Asimov and crashed through the forsythia. Her first instinct was to dump him there in his own yard and leave, for she still wasn’t feeling intelligent enough to talk to Iantha, especially one on one. On the other hand, the longer she spent on this side of the bushes, the fewer drills she’d have to do.

  “What should I do?” she asked Asimov.

  “Mrroww,” he said. Skye got the uncomfortable sense that not only was he judging her, she was falling short.

  “All right, you win,” she said. “I’ll take you to your house.”

  “Mrroww,” he said again, less sternly this time.

  “Stupid cat.” But Skye scratched him under the chin while she carried him to Iantha’s front door.

  She rang the doorbell, and a moment later the mail-slot flap flew open. Skye leaned down—for it was set in the door at knee level—and saw Ben peering out at her.

  “Duck,” he said.

  “Duck yourself,” said Skye. “Where’s your mother?”

  He swung up out of sight, and now the door opened, and there was Iantha. She was holding Ben and smiling in a way that made Skye forget to worry so much about feeling intelligent.

  “Why, it’s Skye, the second Penderwick sister. And you’ve brought Asimov back—how nice of you. Ben keeps letting him out. Don’t you, Ben?”

  Ben had been intently studying Skye. “Pretty,” he said.

  Iantha almost dropped him. “What did he say? Did he say you were pretty?”

  “I’m sure he didn’t,” said Skye, making ghastly faces at him to prove that she wasn’t.

  “No, no, he said ‘pretty’! How wonderful! Say it again, Ben.”

  “Duck.”

  “Well, he did say it once. You must be a good influence, Skye.”

  The last thing Skye wanted was to be a good influence on a baby. She put Asimov down. As he stalked—ungratefully, Skye thought—into the house, there was a sudden increase in the clamor coming from the Penderwicks’ backyard. It sounded as though everyone was shouting and blowing whistles at once.

  “Football drills,” she said, just now realizing how loud they’d been. “I hope we haven’t been bothering you.”

  “No, I like it,” said Iantha. “Your father was a football player?”

  “Daddy? Good grief, no. He played squash and chess.”

  The clamor next door increased even more, with cries of “PIZZA, PIZZA, PIZZA!” added in. Which meant that dinner must have arrived, and the football drills were finally over.

  “I have to go,” said Skye.

  “Yes, of course you do. Thanks again for bringing Asimov home.”

  Skye started to leave, then impulsively turned back, for she’d seen a look—of what, loneliness? She wished Jane were there to help—flit across Iantha’s face.

  “Would you like to come home with me?” she asked. “We’re having pizza. Ben can come, too, if babies can eat pizza.”

  “Ben loves pizza. I mean, if your—” Iantha suddenly looked as shy as she had the first time Skye met her. “Well, your father might mind.”

  “He’s not there. And he wouldn’t mind, anyway.” Skye wasn’t sure how she knew this, but she did. “Please come.”

  It wasn’t the best time to introduce new neighbors to the Penderwick home. The kitchen floor was wet, for Hound had knocked over his water bowl during a game of Chase the Tennis Ball. Jane was loudly describing the big fight in the last soccer game to Tommy at the same time that Rosalind was scolding him for starting on the pizza before the table was even set. And Nick was on his hands and knees, with Batty being a broncobuster on his back and Hound trying to knock them over. Still, Iantha didn’t seem to mind the chaos, not even when Hound jumped up and licked her face—she said she loved dogs—and Ben clearly adored it, especially when Tommy got down on the floor and let him be a broncobuster, too. By the time the floor was mopped, the table set, and the pizza served—and instantly devoured—the kitchen was so full of happy noise that no one heard Mr. Penderwick’s car pulling into the driveway. Which was why it was a shock to hear the front door slam, followed by an impassioned burst of Latin.

  “Nam multum loquaces—how does it go? Blast the woman! She sucked my brain dry. Merito something. Oh, yes—merito omnes habemur, nec mutam profecto repertam ullam esse aut hodie dicunt mulierem aut ullo in saeclo. And I mean it! Except for my Elizabeth, who never talked over an orchestra. Never!”

  Mr. Penderwick reached the kitchen and went silent at the same instant. His hair was sticking straight up, his tie was stuffed into his pocket, and he was gaping at Iantha.

  “I do apologize,” he said after a moment. “I didn’t realize we had company.”

  “Sure you did, Mr. Pen,” said Tommy. “Remember you asked Nick to babysit and you said I could come along?”

  “He doesn’t mean you and Nick,” said Jane.

  Blushing, Tommy shoved a stray bit of pizza crust into his mouth.

  “Daddy, I invited Iantha and Ben over for supper,” said Skye into the silence.

  Mr. Penderwick ran his hand through his hair, apparently trying to flatten it but only making it stick up more. “You’re always welcome, Iantha, though pizza…”

  But Iantha was also talking. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come without your—but Skye was so friendly…”

  They both trailed off at the same time, and once more silence filled the room.

  “How was your date, Mr. Pen?” asked Nick finally.

  “Ghastly.” He surveyed the kitchen, checking even under the table, where Hound was gnawing on a pizza box. “Anna’s not here, is she?”

  “No, Daddy,” said Rosalind.

  “Well, tell her that Lara the Skating Coach talked through Bach’s first five concertos.” He turned back to Iantha. “The Brandenburgs.�
��

  She nodded. “How about the sixth?”

  “We left before the sixth,” he answered grimly.

  Ben, impelled by no one knew what sympathetic urge—though they were all certain he knew nothing of Bach—staggered over to Mr. Penderwick and tugged on his pants. Mr. Penderwick crouched down until they were eye to eye.

  “Duck?” asked Ben.

  “Indeed, one should always duck out of misbegotten dates,” said Mr. Penderwick. “I might add, Ben, that the state of datelessness is not to be lightly discarded.”

  “Amen,” said Nick, who didn’t believe in romance during football season.

  Rosalind, who thought she’d scream if another silence descended on the room, suggested dessert, but Iantha said that it was already long past Ben’s bedtime, and soon the impromptu party was over. The Geiger brothers left for their home, and Iantha and Ben for theirs, with Mr. Penderwick insisting on carrying Ben.

  Now it was just the four sisters.

  “Poor Daddy,” said Rosalind, for his “Ghastly” had stabbed her heart, though it was exactly what she’d hoped for.

  “I—” began Skye.

  Rosalind stopped her. “Do not say I told you so.”

  “I wasn’t! I was just going to say that I’ll have dessert if nobody else will.” Skye took an ice cream bar from the freezer and bit into it.

  “Rosy, what was that Latin Daddy was shouting?” asked Jane.

  “I don’t know. I won’t know that much for years and years, but I think he was complaining about Lara.”

  “Anyway, two awful ladies down. Now we just need to find two more.”

  “How?” asked Batty from under the table, where she’d curled up with Hound and his pizza box.

  “I don’t know that, either.” Rosalind wearily prepared herself to re-embark on the bad-date quest. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Reversals

  AFTER SCHOOL THE NEXT DAY the sisters tried to come up with a new awful woman, but with so little enthusiasm, they decided to put off the vile discussion until the morrow. The morrow was a soccergame Saturday, and Antonio’s Pizza won, with Skye never losing her temper once, and no one wanted to spoil the celebratory mood with a depressing topic. Then that night there was an early frost, and by Sunday morning, autumn had truly arrived. The sky was a rich cloudless blue, the air still and dry, the maple trees glowing with glorious reds and oranges and yellows, and everywhere on Gardam Street squirrels bustled about with self-importance, burying their nuts in the most unlikely places. The Penderwicks agreed it would be sacrilege to conduct a serious MOPS in the midst of all that splendor, so instead they organized a dam-building in Quigley Woods, and Batty fell into a deep part of the creek and was pulled out by Tommy, though only Jane remembered to thank him—Rosalind was too busy wrapping her own sweater around Batty and racing her home to a hot bath.