Isabelle the Itch: The Isabelle Series, Book One (2 page)

“I look pretty good, huh? Do I need to bring a specimen, Mom?”

“The nurse didn't say, so I guess not. And, Isabelle, please behave yourself,” she said as they got in the car.

On the way to the doctor's office, Isabelle tried out her police car siren noise. She could do it, after a lot of practice, like a ventriloquist, without moving her lips. Her mother kept looking anxiously in the rear-view mirror, driving slower and slower until she was practically crawling.

“I keep hearing a police car,” she said, “but they couldn't be after me, I'm only doing thirty.”

Isabelle smiled to herself. “You better step on it, Mom,” she said. They parked the car around the corner from the doctor's office. “We got a new girl today,” Isabelle said. “She's from Utah and her father has three cars.”

“I hope you'll be nice to her,” Isabelle's mother said. “It's tough being new in school.”

“I don't know if I like her. She looks funny and she carries a pocketbook. Of all the dumb things!”

“Isabelle, why don't you, just for once, try being nice to someone because it might make that person feel better? All you think about is yourself. You drive me bananas. And slow down.” Her mother tugged at Isabelle, breathing hard.

“You oughta give up smoking, Mom,” Isabelle said, taking tiny, slow, mincing steps, dragging behind her mother.

“Try being kind. It would be a new sensation and you might even like it.” Her mother pushed the doctor's buzzer. “Snap it up!” she commanded.

“You just told me to slow down,” Isabelle said. “One minute you tell me to slow down and when I do, you tell me to snap it up. I can't keep up with you, Mom.”

“Well, hello there,” said Miss Puffer, the doctor's nurse. Miss Puffer was big and hearty. She hated children. She pretended she liked them but Isabelle knew better. Miss Puffer
watched
all the time. Isabelle had just started to collect cigarette butts from the ash trays in the waiting room when old Puffer snatched them away.

“Mustn't touch,” she said coyly, showing her teeth in a playful smile. Isabelle stared hard at Miss Puffer's bottom, which was the biggest one she'd ever seen. Miss Puffer was solid as a rock. Only under her chin where her neck went down into her uniform was she quivery-fat like Santa Claus's stomach. Isabelle suspected old Puffer practiced saying “Ho Ho Ho” so kids who came for checkups would think she was jolly.

The doctor thumped and tapped and poked Isabelle. Finally, he told her mother, “She's in good shape.” He inspected her feet and felt her bones.

“She's going to be very tall,” he said. “Look at her feet.”

There was a silence. Everybody looked at Isabelle's feet.

“She has her father's feet,” her mother said.

“No, I don't,” Isabelle contradicted. “He has his own. If I had my father's feet, what would
he
walk on?”

Her mother gave her a look calculated to turn Isabelle into jelly.

“Don't be a smart aleck, and don't be so literal,” she said. “You know what I mean.”

The doctor pressed his fingertips together and stared thoughtfully at them, just the way doctors do on television.

“Anything special bothering you?” he asked.

Isabelle's mother leaned forward in her chair. “One thing, doctor. She's such an awful itch, always into something, she drives me crazy. I wonder if it's normal. I mean, is there something wrong with her or do you think it's all right for her to be so itchy? It doesn't seem natural.” Isabelle's mother smiled hopefully at the doctor.

Isabelle put the doctor's stethoscope around her neck.

“Let's have a listen,” she directed, just the way he did.

The doctor unbuttoned his shirt. Isabelle listened.

“Very good, very good indeed,” she said, humming under her breath. Blushing, the doctor buttoned up his shirt.

“Don't worry,” he said, “she'll get over it. She'll get over it after a while.”

“When, doctor?”

Isabelle rummaged through the doctor's wastebasket and fished out a discarded Ace bandage, which she wrapped around her head.

“If I put some ketchup on this, Herbie'll think it's blood,” she said, planning. Isabelle spent quite a lot of time planning things.

The doctor looked over the tops of his glasses. Isabelle suspected he wore them to make himself look older so his patients would have more faith in him.

“Perhaps when she reaches maturity,” he said. “However, in Isabelle's case, it may take a little longer.”

Her mother groaned. “I'll be in the booby hatch long before then,” she said. “Put that bandage back this minute. It's full of germs,” she told Isabelle.

“That's from my last patient. Fell off his bike and broke his collarbone,” the doctor said. “Knit beautifully, if I do say so. Can't do her any harm.”

“Doctor, I was reading a story in the paper about how they give horses pills to make them run faster,” Isabelle said. “I'm saving up for a pair of track shoes, but in case I don't have enough money to buy them before field day, I was wondering if you had any pill samples that would make
me
run faster.”

Isabelle's mother said, “You see, doctor? I'm really not making anything up. She has a natural flair for things like that. What should I do?”

“I would suggest a cruise around the world,” the doctor said. “But if that's beyond you, just hang in there. If you ever channel your ideas and your energy, Isabelle, who knows what might develop?”

He stood up. “You have my sympathy,” he said to Isabelle's mother.

“Take it easy,” he said to Isabelle. “What're you going to do with the bandage?”

“I've got plans,” she said.

“I bet you do,” he answered. He opened the door to his office and said to a lady holding a baby, “You can bring Fred right in, Mrs. Banks.”

Mrs. Banks swept by carrying Fred, who had a red and haughty face and little squinched-up eyes. He wore a hat that made him look like the Red Baron.

“That's some ugly baby,” Isabelle said in a penetrating voice before the doctor had a chance to close his office door. “He looks like an old boxing glove.”

Rolling her eyes upward and putting a finger to her lips, Isabelle's mother dragged her out to the lobby.

“Where on earth did you pick that up?” she demanded.

“Dad,” Isabelle said. “He said that's what I looked like when I was a baby. And Philip too. He says all babies look like old boxing gloves.”

Isabelle's mother hunched her shoulders down into her coat as if she were going out into a blinding snowstorm. Outside, the sun shone with a vengeance that was matched only by the light in Isabelle's brown eyes at the thought of Herbie's face when she rang his bell and he found her, Isabelle, lying on his front porch, bleeding to death from a head wound.

4

“I went to the doctor's today for a checkup,” Isabelle told Philip that night, punching a circle around him the way she'd seen boxers do.

“What'd he discover you've got, water on the brain? Watch your footwork and keep your head down and your hands up, weirdo. You don't want a cauliflower ear in addition to everything else, do you?”

Philip showed her how real boxers did it. Since he'd been in eighth grade, there wasn't much he didn't know.

“Iz, I've got a proposition for you,” he said. Leaning back in his chair, he tucked his thumbs under his arms. “You do my paper route for me next week and I'll pay you a buck.”

He made it sound like a lot.

“A measly buck?” Isabelle said. She would've done it for nothing. Next best thing to having her own route was taking over Philip's. “Why can't you do it?”

Philip put on his dark glasses. “Drama Club practice all next week. We have to get our play into professional shape.” Philip was president of the Drama Club. He also collected stamps and drew pictures of tall, thin naked people wearing galoshes. At least that's what his drawings looked like to Isabelle. Philip said they could be anything you wanted them to be. “That's the best kind of picture,” he said.

“I'll do it if you'll let me ride your bike,” Isabelle tried.

“Nothing doing.” His ten speed bike was sacred. His parents had given it to him for his thirteenth birthday.

“Will you let me carry the money bag and collect?”

“That'd be too dangerous,” Philip said.

“How come?”

“If any muggers found out a little kid like you was carrying money around, they'd mug you and throw you in the gutter.”

“Maybe I'd get my picture in the paper then.”

“Only if you died,” Philip said slowly. “Only if you died.”

“I'll do it if you make it a buck fifty,” Isabelle said. “I'm saving up for Adidas and they're expensive.”

“It's a deal.” Philip grabbed her hand and squeezed hard. “Once we shake on a deal, it's like signing a contract,” he warned. “You can't back out.”

“Please can't I carry the money bag?” Isabelle pleaded. Philip's money bag, which he used to collect at the end of every week, was a beauty. It was bright orange with a drawstring to keep the coins and bills from escaping. They had given it to him at the newspaper office. It was almost the best thing about having a paper route, Isabelle thought.

“I couldn't have that on my conscience,” Philip said solemnly.

“If I had my track shoes, I could outrun those muggers,” Isabelle said.

“Right. You might even make the Olympics,” he agreed.

Isabelle flexed her toes inside her shoes. “They'll probably make me the fastest runner in the world. Faster than the wind, faster than … than …”

Words failed her. What, after all, was faster than the wind?

“You're a good kid, Isabelle. I knew I could count on you.” Philip went back to the crossword puzzle he was working. Isabelle did a little more footwork, keeping her hands up, but he didn't notice so she went to the kitchen and punched around at her mother.

“Cut it out,” her mother finally said.

“Maybe I will and maybe I won't,” Isabelle said, backing off but still punching.

“Maybe you will and maybe you won't what?” her mother asked.

“Do Philip's paper route for him for a measly buck fifty. He never does anything for me.”

“Since when is a buck fifty measly?” her mother wanted to know.

“Can I have a slumber party, Mom?” Isabelle asked.

Her mother shuddered. “Sometime,” she said.

“How about tomorrow night?”

“Daddy and I are going out to dinner tomorrow night.”

“That'd be O.K. Then you wouldn't complain about all the noise.”

Her mother just looked at her.

Isabelle pulled her spelling paper out of her pocket.

“I got a D in spelling today,” she announced.

“Not bad,” her mother said. “She who is on bottom rung of the ladder can only go up.”

“That's what you think,” Isabelle said, smiling. “I got an F yesterday.”

“You're gaining,” her mother said.

Isabelle went upstairs and wrote on her blackboard in big letters:

I HATE MARY ELIZA SHOOK

Then underneath, in small letters she wrote:

i'm gaining

5

“When I get big,” Isabelle told her father Saturday morning, “I'm either going to be a tap dancer or a truck driver.”

“Aim for the top,” he said, kneading his bread. He made bread every Saturday. “Some people play golf for relaxation, some take up needlepoint,” he said. “Me, I make bread.” Other kids brought Mrs. Esposito a bunch of flowers or an apple. Isabelle brought her a loaf of her father's bread.

Mrs. Esposito was always dieting. She wasn't supposed to eat bread or cake or anything good. But she couldn't resist that bread.

“You shouldn't!” Mrs. Esposito wailed every time, grabbing the loaf before it could get away. “Tell your father he shouldn't tempt me!”

Isabelle practiced her tap dancing as she watched her father cover the loaves of bread dough with a cloth. She shuffled off to Buffalo quite a few times before she got it right.

“Why do you cover it, Dad?” she asked, fitting a couple of pieces of spare dough around the inside of her friendship ring to make it fit better.

Dancing in time to the music, she sang,

You go home and get your panties,

I'll go home and get my scanties,

And away we'll go,

Oh ho ho, off we're going to shuffle, shuffle off to Buffalo.

“It rises better if it's covered,” he explained. “Stop jumping around, you might make it fall.”

He put the loaves in the clothes dryer, which he said was the best place for letting them rise. Once, when he'd first started to make bread, he'd put the dough in. the dryer. Isabelle's mother, not knowing anything was inside, had tossed in a load of clean, wet clothes and turned it on.

That was some nice mess. Isabelle really enjoyed the commotion. For once, it wasn't her fault.

Isabelle took down the bottle of ketchup and shook a lavish portion on her Ace bandage. Her father watched with interest.

“Herbie'll think I've been in an accident,” she explained, tying the bandage around her head. “He'll be scared to pieces.” She looked in the mirror. “Not bad. We'll probably fight at his house today,” she said.

Isabelle's father wiped his hands on his pants, leaving big trails of flour on them. He was a pretty messy cook.

“If Herbie's sufficiently scared, maybe you can win,” he said.

Isabelle shuffled off to Buffalo all the way to Herbie's house. It wasn't easy to be a tap dancer, she decided. Maybe, in the long run, it'd be better to be a truck driver. They got to travel a lot and eat in diners all the time.