“Hi, Dawn,” she said.
“Hi,” I replied. “Listen, I really hope you don’t mind that I’m, um …” (I didn’t want to humiliate the girls, but what I meant was that I hoped Mal didn’t mind that I was getting her sisters ready to be the embarrassment of her life.)
“Well,” said Mallory slowly, figuring out what I meant, “you know how I feel about … this, but it is your job, and besides, Claire and Margo are so excited.”
Were they ever! They were sashaying around the living room with their hands on their hips, looking like … I’m not sure what, exactly.
“Why don’t you take them up to their room?” Mallory suggested. “You can have some privacy there, and besides, Mom said something about looking through their closet. We haven’t gotten the official rules from the judges’ panel yet, so we don’t know the details about the pageant, but we do know that … Let’s see. What did Mom say? Oh, yeah. They need a sort of party outfit for this parade in front of the judges and the audience, and another thing to wear in the talent competition, and a third, but we don’t know what yet.”
“Bathing suits!” shouted Margo.
Mallory smiled. “No. This isn’t Miss America, Marg. There’s no swimsuit competition.”
“I want to wear my bathing suit!”
Mallory raised her eyebrows as if to say to me, See what a pain in the neck this pageant’s going to be?
I sighed. “Come on, girls. Let’s go upstairs and see what’s what.”
The girls thundered up the stairs ahead of me.
“Good luck!” Mallory called.
“Thanks,” I replied.
Claire and Margo raced into the bedroom they share. Before I could say a word, they opened their closet and began peeling their clothes off. Margo reached for her bathing suit. On the front was a gigantic alligator, its mouth open in a grin full of big triangular felt teeth.
“This is what I’m wearing,” she announced.
“For what?” I asked.
“The pageant,” Margo replied impatiently.
“But what part of the pageant? You heard Mallory. I really don’t think you’ll need a bathing suit. Listen, the first thing we’ll pick out is a fancy outfit for the parade. Won’t it be fun to get all dressed up?”
“Like for church?” asked Claire.
“Well, or for a birthday party,” I replied.
“But I don’t wear sparkly dresses to birthday parties or church,” said Claire. “The ladies on TV wear sparkles. Or fur. I need to do that, too.”
“Claire, you don’t need to,” I said desperately. “You don’t need bathing suits, either,” I added, glancing at Margo. “Look, let’s forget about your clothes for a while. We can choose those anytime. Why don’t you get dressed again? Then you better start thinking about the talent show. Because you’ll have to rehearse whatever you decide to do. Do you guys know what rehearse means?”
“Choose?” asked Claire.
“It means practice, dummy,” Margo told her.
“Margo,” I admonished her.
Claire stuck her tongue out at her sister. “Silly-billy-goo-goo!”
“Okay, that’s enough,” I said. “Now, listen. What do you want to do in the talent show?”
“What are we supposed to do?” Claire asked.
“Whatever you’re good at. Most people sing or dance or play an instrument. Or they twirl a baton or do acrobatics. The talent competition is like a variety show on TV. What can you do?”
The girls looked thoughtful.
“Do you play the piano?” I asked them.
“I play the kazoo!” exclaimed Claire.
“I can play ‘Chopsticks’ on the piano,” said Margo. “Jordan taught me.”
I shook my head. Then, “How about dancing?” I asked, knowing that Margo, at least, was hopeless.
Claire put her arms in the air. She twirled around and around, got dizzy, tripped over a teddy bear, and fell down.
“What about singing?” I asked after I had kissed her bumped knee.
“I can sing,” said Margo. (Claire was sniffling and rubbing her knee.) “We sing all the time in music class at school. Listen to this. It’s the song about the smart reindeer: Rudolph the Red knows rain, dear.”
“Margo,” I said when she had finished. I paused to think. Margo was giggling away at her reindeer joke, but there was a little problem. She couldn’t carry a tune. She might have been singing any song. Any song at all.
“What?” asked Margo.
I tried to be tactful. “I don’t think Christmas songs are quite right for the pageant.”
“Then I’ll sing,” Claire declared, jumping to her feet, apparently recovered. “This is my best song, and this is what I’ll sing in the pageant: I’m Popeye the sailor man. I live in a garbage can. I eat all the wor-orms and spit out the ger-erms. I’m Popeye the sailor man.”
Claire smiled sweetly at me.
I sank onto her bed.
“That’s it,” said Claire firmly. “That’s my talent.”
There was no changing her mind. At least, I thought, trying to be optimistic, Claire can carry a tune. And she can’t do anything else. “Are you sure you don’t want to sing a different song?” I asked her, just to be sure. “Like ‘Tomorrow’ or ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’?”
“No, Dawn-silly-billy-goo-goo. That’s my best song.”
Well, maybe we could dress her in a little sailor suit or something.
“Okay, Margo. Let’s think about your talent again,” I said. And suddenly inspiration hit. “Hey, you could recite something!” I suggested. “A nice long poem like ‘The Owl and the Pussycat.’”
“I know ‘The House That Jack Built’!” Margo cried. “This is the house that Jack built. This is the malt, that lay in the house that Jack built. This is the rat, that ate the malt, that lay in the house that Jack built.”
Margo wasn’t sure of the rest of the poem, but she found her book called The House That Jack Built, and decided she could memorize it.
“Terrific!” I told her.
But Margo was frowning. “It doesn’t seem like enough,” she said. “It’s just talking. It’s — Hey, I know! I know something I can do well that I’ve never seen anyone else do. It’s real talent! I’ll be right back.”
I looked at Claire. “Do you know what she’s going to do?” I asked her.
“Probably the banana trick.”
The banana trick? My stomach began to feel funny….
Margo returned to the room carrying a banana. “Watch this!” she exclaimed. She sat on the floor, leaned back against her hands, picked up the banana with her feet — and peeled it with her toes.
(And I thought she was uncoordinated!)
“This is the house that Jack built,” she said, after the banana had been peeled. She took a big bite. “Thish ish the mart, that ray in the housh that Jack bit.”
“Shee?” she said a few moments later, as she polished off the last of the banana. “I can peel a banana with my feet. I bet no one else can do that. And I can eat it while I say my poem.”
I closed my eyes. I thought I felt a headache coming on. I didn’t feel any better when I heard Claire say, “My talent is better than yours, Margo. I’m going to win the pageant.”
Of course Margo replied, “No you’re not. I am.”
What next? I wondered. It hadn’t really occurred to me that the Pike girls would be competing against each other. What if one of them did win the pageant? The other would lose not just to strangers or even friends, but to her own sister. How awful!
On the other hand, I was beginning to think that there wasn’t much chance that either girl would win — not with banana-peeling and rude Popeye songs.
“You guys,” I said, “let’s go on to something else. You’re probably going to need to know how to curtsy. I bet you’ll have to curtsy when you meet the judges. How about practicing that for a while?”
The girls looked at me blankly. “What’s curtsy?” asked M
argo.
I explained.
I demonstrated.
The girls tried curtsying.
Margo tipped over sideways. Claire knelt down so low she had trouble getting up.
“Let’s work on poise,” I suggested. I placed a book on each girl’s head. “Now stand up straight and walk gracefully, just as if you were walking by the judges.”
Margo did so, batting her eyes and looking coy.
Claire did so, too, but she swayed her hips back and forth and the book slid to the floor.
“Told you,” said a voice from the doorway.
It was Mallory. She looked disgusted, but her sisters didn’t seem to notice.
“Watch our talents, Mallory-silly-billy-goo-goo!” Claire cried.
Mallory watched. (Margo had to demonstrate without a banana, though. I didn’t want her to spoil her appetite for supper.)
When Claire and Margo were finished, Mallory glanced at me. It was all we could do to keep from laughing. Nevertheless, as I walked home that evening I began to wonder what I’d gotten myself into.
The Pike girls were not pageant material at all.
Thursday
Guess what, everybody. We have another contestant in the Little Miss Stoneybrook pageant — Myriah Perkins. And all the other contestants better watch out because, boy, is she talented. She can sing, tap dance, and act, and she knows ballet. She’s taken lessons for all these things. Oh, she also knows gymnastics. She can turn a cartwheel and stand on her head and do a backward somersault and some other stuff. I am not kidding. Really. I’m not.
Myriah didn’t know anything about the pageant, but when I saw how talented she is, I just knew she’d have to enter. She’ll win, too. I’m sure of it.
When I read Mary Anne’s notebook entry I smelled trouble. Big trouble. The pageant business was getting out of hand. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I was just disappointed that the Pike girls were going to peel bananas and sing about wor-orms and ger-erms. At any rate, Myriah suddenly seemed like hot competition.
The Perkins family lives next door to Mary Anne. They live in the house Kristy lived in before her mother married Watson Brewer and the Thomases moved into his mansion on the other side of town. There are five people in the Perkins family — Mr. and Mrs. Perkins, five-and-a-half-year-old Myriah, two-and-a-half-year-old Gabbie, and Laura, the newest member of the family, who’s just an infant.
The afternoon that Mary Anne sat at the Perkins house was a gloomy, rainy one, but Myriah and Gabbie didn’t seem to mind. (Mary Anne was sitting just for the two older girls while their mother took Laura to the doctor for a checkup.) They had dressed up in funny clothes and were dancing around their playroom.
“On the goo-oo-ood ship Lollipop,” Myriah sang, “it’s a something, something, something to the candy shop, where bonbons play, something, something on Peppermint Bay…. Stop, Gabbie. Wait,” Myriah said. “Where … hmm … And if you eat too much — ooh, ooh — you’ll awake with a tummy ache. … Gabbers, hold on. Let me finish.”
Myriah was trying to remember the words to a song she had learned the year before. She wanted to perform all by herself, but Gabbie kept pulling at her arm. “Let’s sing ‘Silent Night,’” she cried.
“No, Gabbers. It’s not Christmas. And I’m trying to remember this song.”
“Si-ilent night,” Gabbie sang anyway. She strutted across the floor in an old pair of clumpy high-heeled shoes.
“You know,” Myriah told Mary Anne, “if I could just remember the words to this song, I could sing it and tap dance to it. I took lessons last year. I wonder if my tap shoes still fit.”
Myriah dashed out of the playroom.
Gabbie followed her. “I’m coming, too. I’ll look for my baldet shoes. I can be a baldet dancer!” she called over her shoulder to Mary Anne.
In a few minutes, the girls returned. Gabbie returned quietly in a pair of pink ballet slippers that had once belonged to Myriah. Myriah returned noisily. “They fit!” she exclaimed. “My tap shoes still fit! Now watch, Mary Anne. Okay?”
“Okay,” replied Mary Anne. I bet the wheels were turning even then. I bet Mary Anne was mentally auditioning Myriah for the pageant.
Myriah rolled back a throw rug and stood on the wooden floor. She held her arms to one side, smiled, and began stepping across the room. In time to the tapping of her shoes, she sang, “On the goo-oo-ood ship Lollipop, it’s a something, something, something to the candy shop, where bonbons play —” She paused. “I don’t think that’s right, Mary Anne. Not just the something-something part, but even the bonbons part. Oh, well.”
“Well, I’m sure we could find the words printed somewhere. But can you sing any other songs?” asked Mary Anne, knowing full well that she could. Both Gabbie and Myriah are famous in the neighborhood for all the long songs they know.
“I know ‘Tomorrow,’” replied Myriah. “You know, from Annie? But I can’t tap dance to it.”
“Let me hear it anyway,” said Mary Anne.
(Gabbie was dancing a slow, graceful ballet in a corner of the room, lost in her own world.)
“Okay, here goes.” Myriah gathered herself together. Then she belted out, “The sun’ll come out tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun….”
She sang the entire song. She knew every word, was right on pitch, got the timing right, and even added a few hand gestures.
Myriah had an amazing voice.
Mary Anne was impressed. She was so impressed that she told Myriah about the Little Miss Stoneybrook pageant.
“And you think I could be in it?” Myriah asked, awed.
“Sure,” replied Mary Anne. “Why not?”
“I don’t know,” Myriah said slowly.
“Have you ever seen a pageant before?” Mary Anne asked her. “On TV or something? Like Miss America or Miss Universe?”
“Yes,” replied Myriah.
“Well, wouldn’t you like to be in one for girls? You’d get to dress up and sing or dance. And if you won, you’d wear a crown.”
Myriah wasn’t saying anything, but her eyes were growing rounder by the second.
“Could I be in it, too, Mary Anne Spier?” asked Gabbie. (She calls everyone by their full names.) Gabbie had stopped dancing. She came over to the couch, where Mary Anne was sitting, and climbed into her lap.
“Oh, Gabbie, I’m afraid not,” Mary Anne told her. “You have to be five years old to be in the pageant. You have to be five or six or seven or eight. And you’re two.”
“I’m almost three,” Gabbie said hopefully.
“I know, but you need to be five.”
“Yuck, yuck, yuck,” Gabbie replied, sliding out of Mary Anne’s lap. But she didn’t seem too upset.
“You know,” said Myriah excitedly, “there are lots of things I could do in the pageant. I know ballet for real. I mean, I’ve taken lessons. Gabbie just plays in my old shoes. She won’t take lessons until she’s three. But I know all the positions and I can dance to ‘Waltz of the Flowers.’ I know gymnastics, too. And I can act! I took creative theater. I was the baby bear in Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I had to say, ‘Who ate my porridge?’ and ‘Look who’s sleeping in my bed!’ and some other stuff.”
Mary Anne was as excited as Myriah by then. “We’ll have to ask your morn about the pageant, though,” she reminded her. “You’ll have to work in order to get ready for it. And you might need some new clothes.”
Both Mary Anne and Myriah were on pins and needles waiting for Mrs. Perkins and the baby to come home. As soon as they did, Mary Anne, Myriah, and Gabbie all rushed to them.
“What a welcoming committee,” said Mrs. Perkins with a smile.
“I missed Laura Loo, Mommy,” Gabbie said.
“And Mary Anne wants to ask you something,” Myriah spoke up.
“Yes?” said Mrs. Perkins as she unzipped Laura’s little jacket. She placed the baby in an infant seat.
Mary Anne nervously explained about the pageant and said she
’d help Myriah get ready for it. She wondered if maybe she should have mentioned it to Mrs. Perkins before she got Myriah all excited. What if Mrs. Perkins said no?
As it was, she didn’t say yes right away.
Mary Anne and Myriah glanced at each other.
“Please can I be in it?” Myriah asked. “Mary Anne will help me.”
Mrs. Perkins frowned. “Yes, you can be in it, honey —” she began.
“Hurray!” shouted Myriah.
“— and I’ll be happy for Mary Anne to work with you. But I want you to remember something. I want you to think about this.”
“Okay.”
“You, too, Mary Anne,” said Mrs. Perkins.
Mary Anne nodded.
“In any pageant, or in any game or contest, there are winners and there are losers. You might be a winner, Myriah, and that would be wonderful. Daddy and Gabbie and I and even Laura would be very proud of you. But you might be a loser, too. There are going to be lots more losers than winners. And I want you to know that we’ll be proud of you if you lose. We’ll be proud of you for having the courage to be in the pageant, and for the work and rehearsing you’ll do.”
“I know,” said Myriah, giving her mother a hug. “Thank you.”
“One more thing,” said her mother. “I think you should know that for some girls, this pageant won’t be just fun and games. I hope it’ll be fun for you, but for others it will be work. They’ll take it very seriously. You might be competing against girls who have been winners in other pageants, or who have won beauty contests or talent contests. They’ll know how pageants work. And they might — just might — not be very friendly. I want you to understand what you’re getting into, that’s all. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Myriah. She smiled happily. (She was missing four teeth.)
Myriah really had listened and paid attention to what her mother said. But Mary Anne hadn’t. Not much anyway.
As it turned out later, she should have. So should all of us baby-sitters. We kept talking about how winning wasn’t important — and not one of us really believed it. The fact is, Mary Anne knew — she could feel it — that she was going to be the one to sponsor the winner of the Little Miss Stoneybrook crown. She would prove that she was the best baby-sitter of all.