My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.
How can there be no such word as can’t? Ramona wondered. Mrs. Rudge had just said can’t. If there was so such word as can’t then Mrs. Rudge could not have said there was no such word as can’t. Therefore, what Mrs. Rudge said could not be true.
Safely past the livery stable, we crossed back over Maple Street. We usually met a relative or two. Sometimes it was Uncle Fred, my father’s oldest brother, who had a fascinating bald head. After we passed him, Mother said, “You mustn’t stare at Uncle Fred’s bald head. You might hurt his feelings.” How could I hurt his feelings when I so admired his bald head? I once tried to cut off my own hair so I could be bald, too.
Now we lay Picky-picky down to sleep. We pray thee, Lord, his soul to keep. Thy love stay with him through the night and wake him with the morning light.
Then she decided her mother had not really guessed because she often asked where the fire was when Ramona was in a hurry.
Ramona required accuracy from books as well as people.
No family is perfect. Get that idea out of your head. And nobody is perfect either. All we can do is work at it. And we do.
History of Drama did leave me with one valuable thought. One of the playwrights – was it Lope de Vega? – believed that ideas were somehow spewed into the atmosphere to be seized by anyone with a receptive mind, and that upon receiving an idea one should use it immediately because others were sure to pluck the same idea from the spheres. This one wisp of philosophy, no more than a sentence or two from a college course, has haunted me all my writing life.
I did not mind cleaning up my room, dusting, making the salad, but I resented her manner of asking me.
My reading, secluded in my room with the door shut, annoyed Mother. She constantly talked to me through the door and accused me of being snooty. I was not snooty. I was confused and unhappy, and wanted time to think without Mother telling me what to think.
Miss Binney stood in front of her class and began to read aloud from Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, a book that was a favorite of Ramona’s because, unlike so many books for her age, it was neither quiet and sleepy nor sweet and pretty.
She wanted a grown-up to be wrong for a change. She was tired of the rightness of grown-ups.
She didn’t have to go and tell that, thought Ramona, feeling that her mother had betrayed her by telling, as if it were funny, something she had done a long time ago.
Scrimp and pinch to make ends meet, thought Ramona, liking the sound of the words.
Her mother had said the words she longed to hear. Her mother could not get along without her. She felt warm, and safe and comforted.
For the first time, Ramona began to doubt that her father was the best artist in the whole world. This thought made her feel sad...
She did not want her father’s hair to grow thin or her mother’s hair to grow gray. She wanted her parents to stay exactly as they were forever and ever.
Ramona felt sad and somehow lonely, as if she were left out of something important, because her family was in trouble and there was nothing she could do.
Clank, crash, clank. Ramona forgot about her father being out of a job, she forgot how cross he had been since he gave up smoking, she forgot about her mother coming home tired from work and about Beezus being grouchy lately. She was filled with joy.
She felt good from making a lot of noise, she felt good from the hard work from walking so far in her tin can stilts, she felt good from calling a grown-up pieface and from the triumph of singing backwards from ninety-nine to one. She felt good from being out after dark with the rain on her face and the streetlights shining down on her.
Until this minute she had thought all adults were supposed to like all children. She understood by now misunderstandings were to be expected- she had had several with teachers – and often children and grown-ups did not agree, but things somehow worked out. For a grown-up to actually dislike a child and try to shame her, she was sure had to be wrong, very, very wrong.