Isabelle the Itch: The Isabelle Series, Book One (4 page)

Isabelle turned and walked away.

“Hey!” Mary Eliza called, “you got garbage all over you. Wait'll your mother sees you!”

Then, as Isabelle brushed herself off, Mary Eliza disappeared, twirling, leaping, and turning.

8

Isabelle stopped at Mrs. Stern's on her way home. She'd been thinking. Purple would be a good color to paint a room. Purple like an Easter egg.

She circled the house, checking the birdbath and bird feeder hanging from a tree. You could find out an awful lot about a person by checking their yard.

Once, twice she knocked at Mrs. Stern's front door. No answer.

“Up here,” a faint voice called. “I'm up here. Giving my gutters a good cleaning.”

Isabelle looked up, up, what seemed a great distance, and saw a tiny figure on the roof.

“Watch out!” Mrs. Stern hollered as a mass of slimy wet leaves hurtled past. “Whoops! Sorry. Didn't mean to hit you. Be down in a minute.”

And she was.

“How nice to see you again so soon,” she said.

“If I got to paint a room the color I want”—Isabelle got to the point—“I'd choose purple.”

“Purple.” Mrs. Stern mulled it over. “I don't know. It might get on the nerves. Still, it would depend.”

“Purple,” Isabelle said firmly. “Then I'd have a pink rug and yellow curtains.”

“Like a rainbow, sort of,” Mrs. Stern said.

“More like a basket full of jellybeans,” Isabelle noted.

“It's an interesting thought,” Mrs. Stern conceded.

“How come you don't get somebody to clean those gutters for you?” Isabelle asked. “That's dangerous. You might fall and break your leg or something.”

“Stella does her gutters and anything she does, I can do as well.” Mrs. Stern's eyes snapped. “She's not in as good shape as I am, being older, of course, but don't let her hear me say that, she'd have my head.”

“Who's Stella?”

“My sister-in-law, my late husband's sister.” Mrs. Stern pursed her lips. “Butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. She's seventeen months older than I am, and to hear her tell it, you'd think she was a slip of a girl. Always telling me how the doctor said he never saw a woman of her age in such spectacular physical condition. She calls me regularly, to check how I feel, how my arthritis is. Always gets it in how she just put up twenty quarts of her famous green tomato pickle, transplanted fifty tulip bulbs, and then topped it off with nine holes of golf.”

Mrs. Stern's eyes sparkled. “I ask her why she didn't play eighteen, but, then, Stella never did have any sense of humor. That's one of her big problems. That and trying to get ahead of me. Trying to get ahead and stay there. It kills her that she's older than me. The thing of it is, she never forgave me for marrying her brother. She thought no girl in the world was good enough for him. You should've seen her face the day we announced our engagement!”

Mrs. Stern clapped her hands together and laughed at the memory. “How she did carry on! She simmered down after I asked her to be maid of honor, but there's no denying the rivalry between us. I don't like to tempt fate or interfere with the Almighty, but I do ask one thing of Him and that's that He lets Stella go first. I don't think that's too much to ask, do you, considering she's seventeen months older than me?”

“I guess not,” Isabelle said. She wasn't sure what Mrs. Stern meant.

“Where do you want Stella to go?” Isabelle asked. She had discovered that often a direct question was best.

“Why, to Heaven, of course. Where else? I'm not having her outlasting me. How about a glass of milk?”

“No thanks.” Milk wasn't one of Isabelle's favorite beverages. “I better get going. My mother said to come home after Philip showed me his route. He's paying me a buck fifty to do it,” she said.

“What're you going to do with that much money?”

“Buy track shoes. Then I can beat every kid in school at field day,” Isabelle said. “Usually I come in second. When I get my Adidas, I'll come in first.”

Mrs. Stern nodded. She understood. “I used to be pretty fast on my feet, too. Now I jog. That reminds me.” She started to run in place. Then she took off, through the hall, up and down the stairs and back to the kitchen.

“I usually get it out of the way before breakfast,” she explained, “but today it slipped my mind. Keeps me in shape.”

“Mrs. Stern, do you know which river is the biggest in the whole world?” Isabelle asked.

“Let me think.” Mrs. Stern closed her eyes and thought. “Isn't it the Amazon?” she asked. “I think it is.”

“That's what Mary Eliza Shook said,” Isabelle said sadly. “I was hoping she was wrong. But the trouble is, she never is. She's always right.”

“I know the type,” Mrs. Stern said. “Stella in a nutshell.”

9

When she got home, Isabelle stomped out to the kitchen. It was empty so she stomped upstairs. Her mother was looking at herself in the mirror critically.

“They say lines lend character to a face,” she said moodily. “If that's true, I must be some character.”

“Why can't I have a slumber party tonight?” Isabelle whined.

“Because your father and I are going to a party, that's why.”

“So what?” Isabelle sprawled on her mother's bed, messing up the spread. “We could take care of ourselves.”

Her mother looked at her. “Some days I'm too old to be a mother and today's one of them.”

“Some days you look old and some days you look young,” Isabelle told her. “This is one of your old days.”

“Thanks, that makes me feel a lot better.” Isabelle's mother got a long dress out of her closet and held it up against herself. “They say if you never throw anything out, eventually it'll come back into fashion,” she said. “Wasn't I smart to hang on to this?”

“Who's sitting?” Isabelle grumbled.

Her mother put blue stuff on her eyelids and drew a mouth over her own with a new lipstick. “Mrs. Oliver has a virus so I guess Philip will have to be in charge. We're only going a couple of blocks away and I'll leave the number.”

Isabelle hurled herself on the floor and kicked at the rug. “I won't stay with him,” she stormed. “He's a big boss when he's in charge. He bosses me around something terrible. I'll run away.”

She stomped into her room and started throwing things around. She threw her favorite copy of the
Wizard of Oz
into a corner, then she opened her closet door and threw her shoes and rubber boots out and started cleaning the closet floor with her shirttail.

“I bet the neighbors would be shocked if they saw the dirt in this house. That closet hasn't been cleaned in a month of Sundays,” she said at the top of her voice.

Isabelle's mother was sensitive about her house cleaning. She wasn't too good at it. Nothing drove her crazy quicker than people who said they just didn't know what was the matter, but they couldn't stand a less-than-immaculate house. Isabelle's mother always said there were lots more important things in this world than a kitchen floor you could eat off of.

When she ran out of nasty things to say, Isabelle went to the kitchen and stuck her finger into the jar of peanut butter as far as it would go.

ISABELLE WAS HERE, she wrote in peanut butter on the kitchen cabinet.

Her father stood in the doorway.

“Get a sponge and wipe that off,” he directed.

Isabelle scrubbed off the peanut butter while he watched. For good measure, she scrubbed out the kitchen sink. Hard, as hard as she could, she scrubbed until it shone.

Her father inspected her work.

“When you set your mind to it, you can do a first-class job,” he told her. He put his hand on the top of her head, something he did only when he was pleased with her. Isabelle stood very still, enjoying the warm weight of it.

“I'll tell you one thing, Isabelle. When you make up your mind to do something, you can do it. Someday you're going to scale mountains,” he said softly. “When you stop trying to beat the world single-handed, things will fall into place for you.” He hugged her. She smelled the scent of his clothes with delight and thought he was right.

“Mom said I can't have a slumber party,” she said.

“Is that one of those affairs where you don't close your eyes all night?” he asked.

Her mother twirled in front of them, showing off her dress and dangly earrings.

“You going someplace?” her father asked.

“The Gwynnes. I told you last week.”

“Look how I cleaned the sink for you, Mom,” Isabelle said.

“Terrific. It hasn't looked that clean in weeks.”

“I don't want to go to the Gwynnes,” Isabelle's father said. “They bore me.”

“You get to have all the fun.” Isabelle went upstairs and looked up Mary Eliza's number.

“Shook residence, Mary Eliza speaking,” a voice said.

“Let me speak to Mary Eliza Shook, please,” Isabelle said.

Silence. “This
is
Mary Eliza,” the voice said in an irritated way.

Isabelle made a very loud, very rude noise into the receiver and hung up.

She went back to the kitchen.

“You have a choice,” her mother took two TV dinners out of the freezer. “Salisbury steak or meat loaf.”

“You better tell Philip not to hit me,” Isabelle said. “The last time you left him in charge, he ate all the ice cream, plus a jar of apple sauce, and he put his feet on the couch.
And
he said I had to go to bed at nine but he stayed up until he heard the car coming.”

“How do you know?” her mother asked.

“I spied on him. He called up his friends and swore at them over the telephone too.”

“Maybe I better stay home to see that law and order prevails,” her father said.

“What if I get a pain in my stomach or a toothache? Philip wouldn't know what to do and I might even die.” Isabelle could feel the tears start.

“I'll speak to him before we go,” her father said.

Isabelle went to her room and threw a few more things around until she heard Philip come home.

“What do you want?” she said, going down to the kitchen and taking the two TV dinners out of the freezer.

“I'll take the Salisbury steak,” he said.

“No you won't. I want it. Mom said I get first choice.”

“That's O.K., monster, you made me lose my appetite anyway,” he said.

After her parents had left for the party, Isabelle put on her swim mask and flippers and filled the bathtub with water so hot it left a red mark on her as far as it reached. She lay face down in the water looking at the bottom of the bathtub. No man-eating fish there. She kicked as hard as she could, escaping from the mysterious blue whale. When she surfaced, she was gratified to see the amount of water covering the bathroom floor. The ends of her fingers were puckered. She wouldn't have to take another bath for a month, she was so clean.

Isabelle put on her bathrobe and pajamas and ate her Salisbury steak. It was tough. The peas and carrots tasted green and orange. The mashed potatoes didn't taste at all. She threw half the dinner away, then went upstairs to get a sock out of her drawer. Placing it over the telephone receiver to disguise her voice, she made another phone call.

“Hello?” a man's voice answered at Sally Smith's house.

“This is Sgt. Brown down at the police station,” Isabelle said through the sock. “We have complaints that you're making too much noise at your house. We might have to send a squad car over if you don't stop all the yelling.”

She hung up and made hideous faces at herself in the mirror.

PHILIP IS A FINK, she wrote in huge letters on her blackboard. Wet hair streaming on either side of her face, she lay down on her bed and, before she could stop herself, fell asleep.

10

Sunday morning Isabelle woke with a tickly nose and hurting bones. She was probably coming down with a cold. Her mother would ask her if she was constipated. In front of everybody. Her mother had a thing about being constipated. She dished out laxatives like they were lemon drops.

The sun made patterns on the ceiling. Isabelle lay with her arms behind her head and thought about what her father and the doctor had said. Maybe someday if she channeled her energy she
would
scale mountains. And, when she did, Mrs. Stern might like to go along.

“Isabelle,” her mother said sharply, opening her bedroom door, “get out of bed and help me get this water cleaned up.”

“What water?” Isabelle asked innocently.

“It's just lucky for you the living room ceiling didn't collapse,” her mother said. “What on earth were you doing last night in the bathroom?”

“Taking a bath,” Isabelle said, getting up.

“Who was with you, King Kong? The place is a shambles.”

Together, using a sponge mop and towels, they cleaned the bathroom.

“What a way to start Sunday,” her mother said, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. “I don't know why you always have to be so naughty, Isabelle. You have a nice home and good food and Daddy and I love you. And Philip loves you.”

“He does not!” Isabelle protested.

“In his own way, he does. And you're strong and healthy.” Her mother pointed a finger at her. “Think for a minute about children who have to spend days, months even, in the hospital because they have things wrong with them. How would you like that?”

“I wouldn't.”

All through breakfast, Isabelle thought about kids who were sick and couldn't do their brother's paper route and stuff like that. Up in her room, she wrote in little letters down in the left hand corner on her blackboard:

i will be good.

She put on her church dress. It was pink with long sleeves and a bow at the neck. The only socks she could find didn't match. One was knee length, the other an ankle sock. She pulled the short sock up as far as it would go and rolled the knee sock down until it was as fat as a sausage but about the same length as the other. Not bad.