Ramona and Her Father Read online

  Ramona began to practice. Maybe someone would see her and offer her a million dollars to make a television commercial. On her way to school, if her friend Howie did not walk with her, she tipped her head to one side and said, “Pop-pop-pop.” She said to herself, “M-m-m, it’s good,” and giggled. Giggling wasn’t easy when she didn’t have anything to giggle about, but she worked at it. Once she practiced on her mother by asking, “Mommy, wouldn’t it be nice if caramel apples grew on trees?” She had taken to calling her mother Mommy lately, because children on commercials always called their mothers Mommy.

  Mrs. Quimby’s absentminded answer was, “Not really. Caramel is bad for your teeth.” She was wearing slacks so Ramona could not say the line about pantyhose.

  Since the Quimbys no longer bought potato chips or pickles, Ramona found other foods—toast and apples and carrot sticks—to practice good loud crunching on. When they had chicken for dinner, she smacked and licked her fingers.

  “Ramona,” said Mr. Quimby, “your table manners grow worse and worse. Don’t eat so noisily. My grandmother used to say, ‘A smack at the table is worth a smack on the bottom.’”

  Ramona, who did not think she would have liked her father’s grandmother, was embarrassed. She had been practicing to be on television, and she had forgotten her family could hear.

  Ramona continued to practice until she began to feel as if a television camera was watching her wherever she went. She smiled a lot and skipped, feeling that she was cute and lovable. She felt as if she had fluffy blond curls, even though in real life her hair was brown and straight.

  One morning, smiling prettily, she thought, and swinging her lunch box, Ramona skipped to school. Today someone might notice her because she was wearing her red tights. She was happy because this was a special day, the day of Ramona’s parent-teacher conference. Since Mrs. Quimby was at work, Mr. Quimby was going to meet with Mrs. Rogers, her second-grade teacher. Ramona was proud to have a father who would come to school.

  Feeling dainty, curly-haired, and adorable, Ramona skipped into her classroom, and what did she see but Mrs. Rogers with wrinkles around her ankles. Ramona did not hesitate. She skipped right over to her teacher and, since there did not happen to be an elephant in Room 2, turned the words around and said, “Mrs. Rogers, your pantyhose are wrinkled like an elephant’s legs.”

  Mrs. Rogers looked surprised, and the boys and girls who had already taken their seats giggled. All the teacher said was, “Thank you, Ramona, for telling me. And remember, we do not skip inside the school building.”

  Ramona had an uneasy feeling she had displeased her teacher.

  She was sure of it when Howie said, “Ramona, you sure weren’t very polite to Mrs. Rogers.” Howie, a serious thinker, was usually right.

  Suddenly Ramona was no longer an adorable little fluffy-haired girl on television. She was plain old Ramona, a second grader whose own red tights bagged at the knee and wrinkled at the ankle. This wasn’t the way things turned out on television. On television grown-ups always smiled at everything children said.

  During recess Ramona went to the girls’ bathroom and rolled her tights up at the waist to stretch them up at the knee and ankle. Mrs. Rogers must have done the same thing to her pantyhose, because after recess her ankles were smooth. Ramona felt better.

  That afternoon, when the lower grades had been dismissed from their classrooms, Ramona found her father, along with Davy’s mother, waiting outside the door of Room 2 for their conferences with Mrs. Rogers. Davy’s mother’s appointment was first, so Mr. Quimby sat down on a chair outside the door with a folder of Ramona’s schoolwork to look over. Davy stood close to the door, hoping to hear what his teacher was saying about him. Everybody in Room 2 was anxious to learn what the teacher said.

  Mr. Quimby opened Ramona’s folder. “Run along and play on the playground until I’m through,” he told his daughter.

  “Promise you’ll tell me what Mrs. Rogers says about me,” said Ramona.

  Mr. Quimby understood. He smiled and gave his promise.

  Outside, the playground was chilly and damp. The only children who lingered were those whose parents had conferences, and they were more interested in what was going on inside the building than outside. Bored, Ramona looked around for something to do, and because she could find nothing better, she followed a traffic boy across the street. On the opposite side, near the market that had been built when she was in kindergarten, she decided she had time to explore. In a weedy space at the side of the market building, she discovered several burdock plants that bore a prickly crop of brown burs, each covered with sharp, little hooks.

  Ramona saw at once that burs had all sorts of interesting possibilities. She picked two and stuck them together. She added another and another. They were better than Tinker-toys. She would have to tell Howie about them. When she had a string of burs, each clinging to the next, she bent it into a circle and stuck the ends together. A crown! She could make a crown. She picked more burs and built up the circle by making peaks all the way around like the crown the boy wore in the magarine commercial. There was only one thing to do with a crown like that. Ramona crowned herself—ta-da!—like the boy on television.

  Prickly though it was, Ramona enjoyed wearing the crown. She practiced looking surprised, like the boy who ate the margarine, and pretended she was rich and famous and about to meet her father, who would be driving a big shiny car bought with the million dollars she had earned.

  The traffic boys had gone off duty. Ramona remembered to look both ways before she crossed the street, and as she crossed she pretended people were saying, “There goes that rich girl. She earned a million dollars eating margarine on TV.”

  Mr. Quimby was standing on the playground, looking for Ramona. Forgetting all she had been pretending, Ramona ran to him. “What did Mrs. Rogers say about me?” she demanded.

  “That’s some crown you’ve got there,” Mr. Quimby remarked.

  “Daddy, what did she say?” Ramona could not contain her impatience.

  Mr. Quimby grinned. “She said you were impatient.”

  Oh, that. People were always telling Ramona not to be so impatient. “What else?” asked Ramona, as she and her father walked toward home.

  “You are a good reader, but you are careless about spelling.”

  Ramona knew this. Unlike Beezus, who was an excellent speller, Ramona could not believe spelling was important as long as people could understand what she meant. “What else?”

  “She said you draw unusually well for a second grader and your printing is the best in the class.”

  “What else?”

  Mr. Quimby raised one eyebrow as he looked down at Ramona. “She said you were inclined to show off and you sometimes forget your manners.”

  Ramona was indignant at this criticism. “I do not! She’s just making that up.” Then she remembered what she had said about her teacher’s pantyhose and felt subdued. She hoped her teacher had not repeated her remark to her father.

  “I remember my manners most of the time,” said Ramona, wondering what her teacher had meant by showing off. Being first to raise her hand when she knew the answer?

  “Of course you do,” agreed Mr. Quimby. “After all, you are my daughter. Now tell me, how are you going to get that crown off?”

  Using both hands, Ramona tried to lift her crown but only succeeded in pulling her hair. The tiny hooks clung fast. Ramona tugged. Ow! That hurt. She looked helplessly up at her father.

  Mr. Quimby appeared amused. “Who do you think you are? A Rose Festival Queen?”

  Ramona pretended to ignore her father’s question. How silly to act like someone on television when she was a plain old second grader whose tights bagged at the knees again. She hoped her father would not guess. He might. He was good at guessing.

  By then Ramona and her father were home. As Mr. Quimby unlocked the front door, he said, “We’ll have to see what we can do about getting you uncrowned before your mother gets home. An
y ideas?”

  Ramona had no answer, although she was eager to part with the crown before her father guessed what she had been doing. In the kitchen, Mr. Quimby picked off the top of the crown, the part that did not touch Ramona’s hair. That was easy. Now came the hard part.

  “Yow!” said Ramona, when her father tried to lift the crown.

  “That won’t work,” said her father. “Let’s try one bur at a time.” He went to work on one bur, carefully trying to untangle it from Ramona’s hair, one strand at a time. To Ramona, who did not like to stand still, this process took forever. Each bur was snarled in a hundred hairs, and each hair had to be pulled before the bur was loosened. After a very long time, Mr. Quimby handed a hair-entangled bur to Ramona.

  “Yow! Yipe! Leave me some hair,” said Ramona, picturing a bald circle around her head.

  “I’m trying,” said Mr. Quimby and began on the next bur.

  Ramona sighed. Standing still doing nothing was tiresome.

  After what seemed like a long time, Beezus came home from school. She took one look at Ramona and began to laugh.

  “I don’t suppose you ever did anything dumb,” said Ramona, short of patience and anxious lest her sister guess why she was wearing the remains of a crown. “What about the time you—”

  “No arguments,” said Mr. Quimby. “We have a problem to solve, and it might be a good idea if we solved it before your mother comes home from work.”

  Much to Ramona’s annoyance, her sister sat down to watch. “How about soaking?” suggested Beezus. “It might soften all those millions of little hooks.”

  “Yow! Yipe!” said Ramona. “You’re pulling too hard.”

  Mr. Quimby laid another hair-filled bur on the table. “Maybe we should try. This isn’t working.”

  “It’s about time she washed her hair anyway,” said Beezus, a remark Ramona felt was entirely unnecessary. Nobody could shampoo hair full of burs.

  Ramona knelt on a chair with her head in a sinkful of warm water for what seemed like hours until her knees ached and she had a crick in her neck. “Now, Daddy?” she asked at least once a minute.

  “Not yet,” Mr. Quimby answered, feeling a bur. “Nope,” he said at last. “This isn’t going to work.”

  Ramona lifted her dripping head from the sink. When her father tried to dry her hair, the bur hooks clung to the towel. He jerked the towel loose and draped it around Ramona’s shoulders.

  “Well, live and learn,” said Mr. Quimby. “Beezus, scrub some potatoes and throw them in the oven. We can’t have your mother come home and find we haven’t started supper.”

  When Mrs. Quimby arrived, she took one look at her husband trying to untangle Ramona’s wet hair from the burs, groaned, sank limply onto a kitchen chair, and began to laugh.

  By now Ramona was tired, cross, and hungry. “I don’t see anything funny,” she said sullenly.

  Mrs. Quimby managed to stop laughing. “What on earth got into you?” she asked.

  Ramona considered. Was this a question grown-ups asked just to be asking a question, or did her mother expect an answer? “Nothing,” was a safe reply. She would never tell her family how she happened to be wearing a crown of burs. Never, not even if they threw her into a dungeon.

  “Beezus, bring me the scissors,” said Mrs. Quimby.

  Ramona clapped her hands over the burs. “No!” she shrieked and stamped her foot. “I won’t let you cut off my hair! I won’t! I won’t! I won’t!”

  Beezus handed her mother the scissors and gave her sister some advice. “Stop yelling. If you go to bed with burs in your hair, you’ll really get messed up.”

  Ramona had to face the wisdom of Beezus’s words. She stopped yelling to consider the problem once more. “All right,” she said, as if she were granting a favor, “but I want Daddy to do it.” Her father would work with care while her mother, always in a hurry since she was working full time, would go snip-snip-snip and be done with it. Besides, supper would be prepared faster and would taste better if her mother did the cooking.

  “I am honored,” said Mr. Quimby. “Deeply honored.”

  Mrs. Quimby did not seem sorry to hand over the scissors. “Why don’t you go someplace else to work while Beezus and I get supper on the table?”

  Mr. Quimby led Ramona into the living room, where he turned on the television set. “This may take time,” he explained, as he went to work. “We might as well watch the news.”

  Ramona was still anxious. “Don’t cut any more than you have to, Daddy,” she begged, praying the margarine boy would not appear on the screen. “I don’t want everyone at school to make fun of me.” The newscaster was talking about strikes and a lot of things Ramona did not understand.

  “The merest smidgin,” promised her father. Snip. Snip. Snip. He laid a hair-ensnarled bur in an ashtray. Snip. Snip. Snip. He laid another bur beside the first.

  “Does it look awful?” asked Ramona.

  “As my grandmother would say, ‘It will never be noticed from a trotting horse.’”

  Ramona let out a long, shuddery sigh, the closest thing to crying without really crying. Snip. Snip. Snip. Ramona touched the side of her head. She still had hair there. More hair than she expected. She felt a little better.

  The newscaster disappeared from the television screen, and there was that boy again singing:

  Forget your pots, forget your pans.

  It’s not too late to change your plans.

  Ramona thought longingly of the days before her father lost his job, when they could forget their pots and pans and change their plans. She watched the boy open his mouth wide and sink his teeth into that fat hamburger with lettuce, tomato, and cheese hanging out of the bun. She swallowed and said, “I bet that boy has a lot of fun with his million dollars.” She felt so sad. The Quimbys really needed a million dollars. Even one dollar would help.

  Snip. Snip. Snip. “Oh, I don’t know,” said Mr. Quimby. “Money is handy, but it isn’t everything.”

  “I wish I could earn a million dollars like that boy,” said Ramona. This was the closest she would ever come to telling how she happened to set a crown of burs on her head.

  “You know something?” said Mr. Quimby. “I don’t care how much that kid or any other kid earns. I wouldn’t trade you for a million dollars.”

  “Really, Daddy?” That remark about any other kid—Ramona wondered if her father had guessed her reason for the crown, but she would never ask. Never. “Really? Do you mean it?”

  “Really.” Mr. Quimby continued his careful snipping. “I’ll bet that boy’s father wishes he had a little girl who finger-painted and wiped her hands on the cat when she was little and who once cut her own hair so she would be bald like her uncle and who then grew up to be seven years old and crowned herself with burs. Not every father is lucky enough to have a daughter like that.”

  Ramona giggled. “Daddy, you’re being silly!” She was happier than she had been in a long time.

  3

  The Night of the Jack-O’-Lantern

  “Please pass the tommy-toes,” said Ramona, hoping to make someone in the family smile. She felt good when her father smiled as he passed her the bowl of stewed tomatoes. He smiled less and less as the days went by and he had not found work. Too often he was just plain cross. Ramona had learned not to rush home from school and ask, “Did you find a job today, Daddy?” Mrs. Quimby always seemed to look anxious these days, either over the cost of groceries or money the family owed. Beezus had turned into a regular old grouch, because she dreaded Creative Writing and perhaps because she had reached that difficult age Mrs. Quimby was always talking about, although Ramona found this hard to believe.

  Even Picky-picky was not himself. He lashed his tail and stalked angrily away from his dish when Beezus served him Puss-puddy, the cheapest brand of cat food Mrs. Quimby could find in the market.

  All this worried Ramona. She wanted her father to smile and joke, her mother to look happy, her sister to be cheerful, and Picky
-picky to eat his food, wash his whiskers, and purr the way he used to.

  “And so,” Mr. Quimby was saying, “at the end of the interview for the job, the man said he would let me know if anything turned up.”

  Mrs. Quimby sighed. “Let’s hope you hear from him. Oh, by the way, the car has been making a funny noise. A sort of tappety-tappety sound.”

  “It’s Murphy’s Law,” said Mr. Quimby. “Anything that can go wrong will.”

  Ramona knew her father was not joking this time. Last week, when the washing machine refused to work, the Quimbys had been horrified by the size of the repair bill.

  “I like tommy-toes,” said Ramona, hoping her little joke would work a second time. This was not exactly true, but she was willing to sacrifice truth for a smile.

  Since no one paid any attention, Ramona spoke louder as she lifted the bowl of stewed tomatoes. “Does anybody want any tommy-toes?” she asked. The bowl tipped. Mrs. Quimby silently reached over and wiped spilled juice from the table with her napkin. Crestfallen, Ramona set the bowl down. No one had smiled.

  “Ramona,” said Mr. Quimby, “my grandmother used to have a saying. ‘First time is funny, second time is silly, third time is a spanking.’”

  Ramona looked down at her place mat. Nothing seemed to go right lately. Picky-picky must have felt the same way. He sat down beside Beezus and meowed his crossest meow.

  Mr. Quimby lit a cigarette and asked his older daughter, “Haven’t you fed that cat yet?”

  Beezus rose to clear the table. “It wouldn’t do any good. He hasn’t eaten his breakfast. He won’t eat that cheap Puss-puddy.”

  “Too bad about him.” Mr. Quimby blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling.

  “He goes next door and mews as if we never give him anything to eat,” said Beezus. “It’s embarrassing.”