Blow Out the Moon (3 page)

“All right,” my mother said (to me). “As long as all four of you play together, and ask before you go outside.”

I ran back.

“She said yes!”

We ran upstairs. Neil was talking to Emmy, looking a little nicer than he had before. And when Henry and I were listing things we could do and trying to choose, he looked really interested, and after a while he said, “In England on rainy days people go down the stairs on trays. It’s called indoor tobogganing.”

That sounded fun to me.

“Let’s try it!” I said. “We don’t have any big trays — except the one my mother is using — but what about a box? There are plenty of those lying around!”

“A box going down stairs with people in it would be hard to control,” Henry said. “And dangerous, too.”

He looked at Neil kind of disapprovingly.

“I haven’t actually done it,” Neil said.

I still wanted to try it, but no one else did, and Henry kept saying more and more reasons against it. Finally I said, “Oh, all right! What about Sardines?”

“What’s that?” Neil said eagerly, as though he thought it was going to be something exciting.

“Someone hides … when you find him, you get into the hiding place, too — IF you can do it without anyone else seeing you,” I said, looking at Emmy. Once, when Peg was It, Emmy held out her arms and shouted “Peggy!” as soon as she saw her — right in front of all of us, even though no one else had seen Peggy! It was kind of funny, but still.

“That was when I was only five,” Emmy said.

When it was my turn to hide, I ran, quietly, to the big barrel filled with crumpled-up paper I’d seen in the dining room. I boosted myself up with my arms (the way I do when I jump onto the kitchen counter), and then it was easy to lower my legs in quietly, so the paper wouldn’t rustle.

I curled up like a cat; all I could see was the ceiling and the sides of the barrel. I could hear the others tramping around, and laughing and yelling. Something fell over with a loud crash.

Then I heard quick footsteps in the dining room. I looked up — and saw my mother staring down at me.

“Honestly, Libby!” she said. “No! No! Don’t move!”

She grabbed me by one shoulder and one knee so hard that it hurt, and swung me out of the barrel and up into the air. Then she let go of me, fast — my feet banged the floor.

“You are the limit,” she said. “Can’t you ever be careful of anything?”

“But — what did I do?”

She just looked at me.

“Was there something in the barrel besides paper?” I said.

“The wildflower breakfast set.”

From the wildflower breakfast set.

I knew the one she meant. She put her hand in the barrel and took out a big ball of paper and held it in both hands. Without looking at me, she said, “This china was my grandmother’s. I’ve never broken even one teacup handle.”

Henry, Neil, and Emmy ran in. They stopped when they saw our mother and stood in the doorway staring at her with their mouths hanging open. Henry and Emmy know that our mother doesn’t yell and doesn’t hit and doesn’t get mad. She wasn’t yelling but she really was mad, everyone could see that.

“If ONE THING in that china barrel is broken —” She stopped; I waited, but she didn’t say anything else.

“What?” I said. “What will happen?”

She didn’t say anything.

“IS anything broken?” I said.

“I don’t know.”

“Well can’t you look?” I said — I hate waiting for punishments, I’d rather just get it over with.

She didn’t answer me; she just looked at the ball of paper in her hands — it was probably one of the china pieces.

“If anything is broken there’s nothing I can do about it now,” she said finally. She put the china piece (whatever it was) back in the barrel, very gently, without looking at me at all.

“But then when will I find out what my punishment is going to be?”

“You’ll just have to wait until we come back from England and I unpack this barrel,” she said, and went back to the living room.

Her grandmother gave her the breakfast set because she liked it so much, and she always washes it by hand, not in the dishwasher. Each piece has flowers painted on it, and she says they’re realistic — that’s one reason she liked them so much when she was a child. She liked flowers and china and dolls and things like that when she was a little girl. She wasn’t a tomboy like me.

Slowly, I walked to the living room door to tell my mother I was sorry — she had looked so sad, and it was a pretty stupid thing to have done. But my mother’s back was to the door, and when Mrs. Grant saw me, she looked almost as if she was scared. I didn’t want to apologize in front of
her
.

So I went back to the dining room. Neil and Emmy were talking — he seemed shocked and she looked worried. Henry was peering curiously into the china barrel.

I looked into it, too.

“Maybe nothing’s broken,” Henry said. “It looks like there’s a lot of padding in there, and you’re pretty light.”

That was nice of him; but I wondered what my father would do. My mother hardly ever punishes us. (Henry always says he wishes she could be our teacher, “because she’d always be saying ‘I’ll give you one more chance.’ ”) My father does.

Chapter Four:

“Bon Voyage!”

The first thing my father asked my mother about at dinner (we were having a family “Bon Voyage!” party for my father, with poppers from Chinatown as party favors) was the tea party, and she said, “I think it was interesting for everyone.”

If that was some kind of code, my father didn’t get it. No one said anything else about the tea party or the china barrel.

When we came downstairs the next morning, our parents were both up and dressed! (Usually on weekend mornings we get up way before they do.) My father was in his work clothes, and a suitcase was standing next to his briefcase. He looked really excited — he was leaping around my mother, laughing and trying to pick her up. She was shaking her head and kind of pushing him away but kind of not.

Party favors from Chinatown: When you pull the string, they explode with a loud noise and smell of gunpowder.

“Come and give me a kiss, kids,” he said. “The next time you see me will be in England!”

“In London?” I said — I was excited, too, about going on the boat and everything.

“No, I’ll meet you where the boat docks and we’ll all take a train together to London.”

That sounded fun, too — I was about to ask if we would walk down a gangplank and he would be standing at the bottom of it, waving to us — when Emmy started to cry. My father stood still and looked sad for a second.

“Aw, Em, don’t cry,” he said, picking her up. “It’s not very long until November tenth.”

“I bet that’s the day the boat — the Liberty! — docks!” I said.

“Why can’t we all go together?” Emmy said.

“I have to find a place for us to live, and a school for you and Libby, and your mother has to pack and get your passports and rent the house,” he said, and looked at my mother eagerly. “Right, Sall?”

My mother nodded; she didn’t look excited at all.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get it done, there’s time,” he said, putting Emmy down. Then he gave her a big hug and said it was time to leave. “So long, shorty! Be good!” he said to me, and he bent down for us all to kiss him.

After my father left, we didn’t have dining room dinners anymore — we ate in the kitchen and our mother let us talk as much as we wanted. We got to miss school for our passport picture. People came to look at the house, and my mother’s friends came over a lot to help — they brought their children, and we played with them, and she let The Gang play inside, too.

But one day, she said NO ONE ELSE COULD COME OVER UNTIL WE WERE DONE PACKING. We couldn’t even go outside and play! She said, “Have you decided yet which three books or toys you’re going to take?”

“Not quite,” I said. I HAD been thinking about it, though. “
Peter Pan
(because it was my first favorite book) and
Little Women
(because it’s my favorite book now), but I’m not sure about the third thing.”

I was hesitating between my six-shooter and its holster (which I hoped would count as one thing) or a perfume bottle my grandmother had given me that had once belonged to a real princess. I liked it because of that, and because of its color (dark green glass with a few tiny white leaves and real gold top) and shape. I was also thinking of
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
, because it was the longest, thickest book I had, and I like fairy tales — especially “Rumpelstiltskin” and “One Eye, Two Eyes, and Three Eyes” (that little table that spreads itself with a white cloth and food!). It was a hard choice.

A picture from the fairy tale “East of the Sun and West of the Moon.”

“I’ve ALMOST decided on
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
,” I said. Privately, I was also planning to bring my little metal horse: It was so small that I could put it in a pocket, or around my wrist with its chain bridle.

“Well, you can be thinking about it while you sort and pack your papers,” my mother said, opening the big drawer where we keep our old drawings and stories.

“You need to throw out —,” she hesitated, then took out two big piles, “about that many papers each.”

She gave one pile to Emmy and one to me.

“I’ll come back to check on you in fifteen minutes.”

We sat down with our piles: When I found something of Emmy’s, I handed it to her; when she found something of mine, she handed it to me, as usual. But usually our mother looks at the things with us. We all — including our mother — talk about what we find and other things, too; it’s fun. But that day, she didn’t look at anything, even after she said she would “supervise” (usually, that means she does most of whatever it is, but when we sort, she just watches).

She did sit down on the bed. But she kept jumping up to go pack things, and then running back in to hurry us along, instead of admiring our drawings and stories with us as usual.

She did look at one of Emmy’s old drawings and listen to me read one of my silly witch stories out loud, though. Then I found an old paper-doll book.

“Annie Oakley! I’ve been wondering where this was!” I said. “Remember, I got it for my birthday and I never cut out ONE outfit: look, they’re all still in here. Even Annie Oakley is still here — where are the scissors?”

PART OF THE SILLY WITCH STORY I READ:

One day the Witch said, “I will fool those little kids, I’m hurrying.”

And then she hurried down to the store. “Um,” she said.

“What do you want?” said the ghost, for it was the ghost store.

“I want to buy some apples.”

“Do you have to?”

“Yes I need them!” she shouted.

So he gave her a bag of rotten apples.

“For Pete’s sake!” said the Witch. “Of all the crazy things …”

“I thought you didn’t like paper dolls,” our mother said. She does; sometimes she cuts them out with us. It’s true that usually I don’t: If you make a mistake cutting out their faces, they look funny; and the little tabs that hold on the clothes (and the clothes themselves) rip and fall off so easily.

“I like Annie Oakley,” I said. The cover showed Annie riding a galloping horse with her elbows sticking out. Inside were cowboy boots and buckskin jackets and cowgirl skirts and gun holsters, not the usual paper-doll things. “Where are the scissors?”