Teddy & Co.

by Cynthia Voigt

  “Yes, you are. Much better,” said Zia as she passed out ice cream cones, giving Sid his first.

  Then it was time to go back to their own houses. Umpah pushed Teddy’s wagon across the wet grass, staying under the wide branches of the beech tree for as long as he could because the leaves kept off much of the rain. Clara and Mr. B had her broad, fringed umbrella to walk under. “Good night, good night. Maybe the rain will be gone in the morning,” they all said to one another. “Maybe tomorrow the sun will come out.”

  The next day, however, was just as rainy. Teddy looked out the window at the gray and watery view. He could see drops of rain bouncing up off the surface of puddles. “Doesn’t the sky ever run out of rain?” he asked.

  Zia and Prinny arrived, wearing big, broad-brimmed yellow hats to keep dry. “Oh dear, Umpah,” Zia said. “Oh dearie dear, what bad weather. What will we do?”

  “Play checkers,” suggested Prinny, adding, “Before Clara gets here.”

  “We did that yesterday,” Teddy said.

  “I’m going to make bread,” Umpah decided. “Bread takes a good long time.”

  Sid slipped in through the door in time to hear that. “What about muffins? Everybody prefers muffins.”

  “I’d rather have bread,” said Teddy. If it was going to keep on raining, he was going to start disagreeing about everything.

  “First I’ll make muffins,” Umpah decided. “Then I’ll make bread.” He had plenty to do now, so he was happy.

  “I’ll sweep,” Zia said, looking around. “This place could use a good sweep. But first, I’ll dust,” she decided. That way, she would be busy for a long time.

  At that moment Clara and Mr. B splashed through the puddles and up to Teddy’s door. “Good morning,” said Clara, coming inside and taking off her boots. “It’s still raining.”

  “Is Peng here yet?” asked Mr. B.

  “No,” Prinny told him.

  “I’ll go get him. It’s a good thing I left my boots on.”

  “You’ll get wet without my umbrella,” Clara told him. “But it’s too big for you to carry, so you’d better stay inside.”

  “I won’t get awfully wet. I can go fast.” And Mr. B was gone.

  “What will we do today?” Clara asked. “I’m wearing a yellow dress to brighten everything up. Doesn’t it cheer you up to see me in my yellow dress with the gold trim?”

  “I wish I had a yellow dress,” Prinny said.

  “You don’t have any dresses,” Teddy pointed out disagreeably.

  “I wish I had any dress,” said Prinny. “Zia? Why don’t I have any dress?”

  Umpah came out from the kitchen, taking off his apron. “Today, first thing, we will exercise,” he said.

  “Isn’t it my job to make plans and decisions?” asked Clara.

  “What do you mean, exercise?” asked the others.

  “If you’re cooped up inside all day, you need to exercise,” Umpah said. “It keeps you from getting grouchy.”

  “I’m not grouchy,” Teddy said disagreeably. “I’m just bored.”

  “Exercise is also good for boredom,” Umpah told him.

  Teddy did not agree. “Exercising my brain is what’s good for my boredom,” he said.

  “You will be the leader,” Umpah told him. “And the counter. You will choose the exercise, and watch to see if everybody is doing it correctly, and keep count of how many we have done.”

  “I want to be the leader,” said Clara. “I’m the Queen.”

  “Not today you aren’t,” Teddy told her disagreeably. “We didn’t vote, so you can’t be.” He could choose and count, and he could check for correctness, too. He wanted to be the leader. “First,” he said, “toe touches.”

  Sid was about to say something, Teddy could see that, and he knew what it was going to be, so he didn’t give Sid a chance to speak. “Toe touches or tail touches,” he said. “I’ll do finger touches. Everybody does what he can. Or she can,” he added quickly. “Are you ready? Everybody stand up straight!”

  They gathered around in front of his wagon, every one of them standing as straight as he or she could, which in Sid’s case wasn’t very straight at all.

  Teddy studied them. “Good,” he said. “All right. Everybody ready? Then here we go. One, reach up. Two, bend down. Three, straighten up.” He finger touched and watched and checked. Then he told them, “That’s right. Now, again. One—up. Two—down. Three—up. And again, One. Two. Three.” For some reason, Teddy was feeling better.

  He didn’t even mind when Mr. B interrupted the exercise. Mr. B came into the room, took off his boots first, and then removed his soaked ruff. He reported, “Peng wants to be left alone.”

  “That’s the way Peng is,” Zia reminded him.

  “We’re exercising,” Teddy said.

  Mr. B thought about it. He looked at the exercisers. He looked at Teddy in his red wagon. He looked at the exercisers again and finally decided that he might as well join in.

  Teddy resumed business. “All right, everyone. Now. Lie down on the floor and lift your legs—or your tail—into the air,” said Teddy. “We’re going to do one hundred bicycle pedalings. You too, Mr. B, legs in the air. Everyone ready? And one-around, and two-around.” He checked to see that the exercise was being done correctly, counting all the slow way up to one hundred. All the time he was counting, he was listing in his head every exercise he knew. He was enjoying being the leader.

  After the exercising, Clara told them a story about a queen everybody liked because she was so beautiful, and she saved them from a dragon too. Then they ate fresh-baked raspberry muffins, with butter and jam. When they were finished eating, Umpah asked, “Why don’t we all have a nice little nap together?” so they did that.

  When they woke up, they looked out the windows and listened, and still all they could see and hear was falling rain. However, all of the leading and exercising and napping had set Teddy’s brain to work and he had an idea. “We should give a play,” he said.

  Mr. B moved away, toward a quiet corner of the room, a corner filled up by a soft red-and-white-striped pillow, a good place for more napping.

  “What play will we give?” asked Sid.

  “I don’t know any plays,” said Prinny.

  “I’ll make it up,” said Teddy.

  “We could all make it up together,” Umpah suggested.

  “And then we can act it,” Clara said.

  “I don’t know how to act,” said Prinny.

  “I do,” Mr. B announced from his corner. He stood up and walked to the center of the room. “Watch,” he told them.

  Mr. B tied his ruff back around his throat and put on the wide yellow hat Prinny had worn that morning to keep off the rain. He stood up tall and looked slowly around at them all. Then he swept the hat off his head and bowed low, sweeping the hat along the floor before straightening up again, the hat now held up against his chest, as he made the announcement to Clara in a big, round voice, quite a different voice from his usual one. This new voice was excited and important and urgent.

  “Your Majesty! I bring news of danger from the West. You must prepare yourself. Call out the bravest of your knights! Ladies, stay in your houses!” He pointed up at the ceiling and they all looked, to see what was wrong up there. “It’s the dragon!” Mr. B cried.

  “Oh dear, oh dearie me. Where is it?” asked Zia. “I can’t see it!”

  “It’s pretend,” Mr. B answered, in his ordinary voice. “It’s acting.”

  “I could do that!” cried Prinny. “Can I try?”

  All afternoon they wrote the play, and then made costumes to wear, and then acted out the scenes. First Teddy had the job of writing and then he was the director and then he was the audience, which he did especially well, calling out “Bravo! Bravo! Encore!” and “Hurray! Hurray!” He clapped as long and hard as he could.

  That night, falling asleep, each one of them hoped, Maybe tomorrow morning the rain will be gone.

  When, f
or the third morning in a row, Teddy awoke to the sound of rain drumming on the roof, he closed his eyes and tried very hard to go back to sleep.

  Sid had no roof and no windows, so he went to the entrance to his burrow to check the weather. Before he put his head out, he could hear rain splattering down onto the wet ground, so he turned around and went back into his dry, dark room.

  From her doorway, Prinny heard how the raindrops spattered down onto the leaves of the beech tree, and all she could think to do was shut the door.

  When Clara saw that it was raining, again, she felt extremely cross. The only one around to be cross at was Mr. B, so she told him, “If you think I’m going to hold my umbrella up for you when we go out today, you’re wrong.”

  “I’m going to stay with Peng for a while,” Mr. B answered. He tied his ruffled collar around his neck, even though in the rain it always got soaked through and became even more annoying than usual. If you started life out with a ruff collar around your neck, you had to wear it even if you didn’t want to. He pulled on his boots and left the palace, hopping as fast as he could through the falling rain.

  Clara sat by the window, looking out, feeling cross.

  Because she was sitting by the window, Clara saw them all coming together, to her palace. Umpah pushed Teddy’s wagon while Sid slid beside it, holding a muffin pan over the round brown head to keep the bear dry. Prinny and Zia wore their wide hats, but Sid didn’t mind being wet. Head high to keep the pan up, he slithered along through the grass, staying close to the wagon. The yellow hats, red wagon, and Sid’s bright stripes gave color to the gray and rainy morning. Watching them all splash along the path, Clara was for some reason suddenly cheerful.

  She opened her red door as wide as it would go. “Come in. Come in out of the rain. Take off your boots. Stay where you are while I get towels so you can dry off.”

  When they had dried themselves and one another, they went into the biggest room in Clara’s palace, the Royal Audience Room. For a while they could only talk about the weather. “Terrible,” they said, and “The ground is full of puddles,” and “When will it ever end?”

  “Depressing,” they said, and “Boring,” and “What is there to do?”

  Zia told Clara, “I’ll dust and sweep. I’ll clean the palace. I’ve never cleaned a palace, and I’ve already cleaned my pink house three times and Teddy’s red house twice. So may I do yours today? Please?”

  “Of course,” said Clara. Then she asked hopefully, “Shall I be Queen today?”

  “Why would we want a queen for today?” asked Teddy.

  “Because it’s my palace and because I know some good pretends,” Clara said. “Also, I have checkers and Parcheesi, and I have a jigsaw puzzle that’s a map of the world.”

  “The whole world?” asked Teddy. “All of it? We could do the puzzle first,” he suggested. “We could do the puzzle now.”

  They voted, and Clara was Queen for that day. Now both Clara and Zia were happy, and so was Umpah, who went off to make cheese muffins. “In this weather, everybody needs hearty food,” he said.

  Clara told the Royal Announcer to announce the first activity. Sid was pleased to be important again. He announced, “We will play Parcheesi.”

  “But—” Teddy began.

  Queen Clara held up her hand. “Rule Four,” she said. “Announce it,” she told Sid, who said, “Rule Four.”

  Teddy sighed.

  “I can’t remember the rules,” Prinny whispered to Zia.

  “You’re a princess today,” Zia whispered back. “You don’t have to remember.”

  Clara told the Royal Announcer to announce the game again, so Sid said, “We will play Parcheesi.”

  “I wanted to do the puzzle first,” Teddy said sadly, maybe speaking to Umpah, maybe just to himself.

  Clara brought out the Parcheesi set. They were all in her palace playing her game, and that was the way she liked things.

  Sid had a long board game to play, a game with lots of rules and a long twisting path to follow all around the board. He got to make the announcements and play a long game and, in a little while, smell the good hearty smell of cheese muffins baking in the oven. He was happy.

  When Teddy’s blue pieces were on the opposite side of the board from his wagon, Prinny moved his blue ones and her red ones too. So half of the time, Prinny got to play twice as much as anyone else, which made her happy.

  They had only just started when Mr. B returned. He took off his wet ruff and his boots. He sat down at the Parcheesi board. He didn’t say a word about Peng and he didn’t have to. Instead, “I’m green,” Mr. B told them, and then he said, “I should get a turn right now, to catch up. I bet Peng will get tired of being alone all the time,” he decided, and that thought cheered him up. “He might even want me to stay with him. Maybe tonight.”

  While they rolled the dice and moved their pieces around the Parcheesi board, they talked about how different Peng was from everybody else. “He doesn’t like us the way we like us,” Prinny explained.

  “He’s very different from us,” Clara decided.

  “Aren’t we all different?” asked Teddy. “Each one of us?”

  That very interesting idea started to cheer him up, but when Zia said, “I wish Peng would want to spend the day with us,” and the others agreed with her, Teddy sighed. Again.

  “He doesn’t want to,” Mr. B told them.

  “But he does like us,” Prinny said. “In his different way. He likes living on our island with us, when we’re outside especially, especially when we’re swimming.”

  They played on, moving their pieces in a race to Home. While they played they talked about what Peng might be doing, all alone on all these long rainy days, and about how much they didn’t like this weather. Then they talked about other days—“Remember when we went exploring?”—days when the sun was shining warm onto the island—“Remember when Prinny and Zia learned to swim?”

  After Parcheesi, it was time to eat the very good cheese muffins Umpah had made. After the muffins, Clara told Sid to announce that it was time for the jigsaw puzzle. They set the pieces out on a table and everyone worked on it together. Teddy watched as the seven seas and the five continents took shape. He put together pieces and also suggested pieces for others to try. “Sid, maybe that white piece is the Himalayas, which are very high mountains and always covered with snow. No, not that white piece, the one three away from it. No, not that one, three away in the other direction, toward me. I said, the white piece.” And he sighed, because he would have liked to do the jigsaw puzzle all by himself and he knew he wasn’t supposed to have such an unfriendly idea.

  It took a long time to finish the puzzle, but when it was done, Teddy could see what the whole world looked like all put together, with its mountain ranges and islands, all the different countries and the long rivers. He thought about how large the whole world was all put together, and how small a bear in a red wagon was, compared to the whole world. He guessed that a bear in a red wagon didn’t matter very much, not compared to the whole world. That was an interesting idea, although not a cheerful one.

  In the late afternoon Clara held a pretend tea party, with real cups and saucers, and a real china teapot for the pretend tea. She had a special silver plate to hold pretend cookies, and pretend slices of cake, and pretend thin sandwiches cut into triangles. “You have to drink and eat politely,” Clara said, showing them how to sip from the teacup. “Today we are playing at my house,” she reminded Sid, who wasn’t interested in pretend food. “I’m the Queen,” she reminded Mr. B, who tried to sneak away for a nap. “At tea, you talk politely,” she told them.

  Everybody tried to talk politely, except Teddy, who wasn’t talking at all. He was wondering why a bear had to be so small when the world was so large. He was wondering why nobody else liked thinking more than eating or swimming, or pretending.

  Then Sid said he hoped that if it rained the next day—which he hoped it wouldn’t, and they agreed with him
about that—but if it did, he wanted them to come to his burrow.

  “You don’t have games or puzzles,” Mr. B said.

  “I want to have a turn,” Sid said.

  “If there’s nothing to do, what can we do all day in Sid’s burrow?” Prinny asked. “Teddy? Do you have an idea?”

  Teddy didn’t answer. He only sighed.

  “Your burrow is too small and dirty for any queen to go into,” Clara said. “Everybody better come back here.”

  “But it’s my turn to have a turn,” Sid said.

  “Oh dearie me, Sid,” said Zia. “There’s nothing for me to do in your burrow. The floor is dirt, so if I sweep I’ll sweep away your floor.”

  “But—” Sid started.

  “There’s no oven,” Umpah said, speaking softly. He hoped that if he said it softly, maybe Sid wouldn’t mind. “You don’t want to go all day without muffins, do you?”

  “Of course not,” said Sid, and for some reason those muffins made him feel cheery again. “What kind of muffins will they be, tomorrow?”

  “Rain or shine, we’ll have peach muffins,” Umpah promised.

  “We want shine!” they all cried in loud and hopeful voices—all except Teddy, that is.

  It was when everyone else was busy yelling out their sunshine hopes and Teddy didn’t join in that Prinny started to wonder. Once she started to wonder, she began to remember that Teddy hadn’t said anything much since the jigsaw puzzle, not about the muffins, not about the tea party, and not even to think up an excuse to not spend a day in Sid’s dark, chilly burrow.

  What was wrong with Teddy?

  Maybe nothing. Probably nothing.

  But Teddy usually talked more than anyone else and had more ideas to talk about too.

  That night, when Prinny went to bed, she heard the rain drumming on her roof and the wind curling around the eaves of the pink house and she thought about Teddy. It took her longer than usual to fall asleep.