Harriet the Spy (13 page)

The note must have misfired. Pinky sat to the right and it was addressed to Sport, who sat on her left.

What was sickening about a tomato sandwich? Harriet felt the taste in her mouth. Were they crazy? It was the best taste in the world. Her mouth watered at the memory of the mayonnaise. It was an experience, as Mrs. Welsch was always saying. How could it make anyone sick? Pinky Whitehead was what could make you sick. Those stick legs and the way his neck seemed to swivel up and down away from his body. She wrote in her notebook:

THERE IS NO REST FOR THE WEARY.

As she looked up she saw Marion Hawthorne turn swiftly in her direction. Then suddenly she was looking full at Marion Hawthorne’s tongue out at her, and a terribly ugly face around the tongue, with eyes all screwed up and pulled down by two fingers so that the whole thing looked as though Marion Hawthorne were going to be carted away to the hospital. Harriet glanced quickly at Miss Elson. Miss Elson was dreaming out the window. Harriet wrote quickly:

HOW UNLIKE MARION HAWTHORNE, I DIDN’T THINK SHE EVER DID ANYTHING BAD.

Then she heard the giggles. She looked up. Everyone had caught the look. Everyone was giggling and laughing with Marion, even Sport and Janie. Miss Elson turned around and every face went blank, everybody bent again over the desks. Harriet wrote quietly.

PERHAPS I CAN TALK TO MY MOTHER ABOUT CHANGING SCHOOLS. I HAVE THE FEELING THIS MORNING THAT EVERYONE IN THIS SCHOOL IS INSANE. I MIGHT POSSIBLY BRING A HAM SANDWICH TOMORROW BUT I HAVE TO THINK ABOUT IT.

The lunch bell rang. Everyone jumped as though they had one body and pushed out the door. Harriet jumped too, but for some reason or other three people bumped into her as she did. It was so fast she didn’t even see who it was, but the way they did it she was pushed so far back that she was the last one out the door. They all ran ahead, had gotten their lunchboxes, and were outside by the time she got to the cloakroom. It’s true that she was detained because she had to make a note of the fact that Miss Elson went to the science room to talk to Miss Maynard, which had never happened before in the history of the school.

When she picked up her lunch the bag felt very light. She reached inside and there was only crumpled paper. They had taken her tomato sandwich. They had
taken
her tomato sandwich. Someone had
taken
it. She couldn’t get over it. This was completely against the rules of the school. No one was supposed to steal your tomato sandwich. She had been coming to this school since she was four—let’s see, that made seven years and in all those seven years no one had ever taken her tomato sandwich. Not even during those six months when she had brought pickle sandwiches with mustard. No one had even asked for so much as a bite. Sometimes Beth Ellen passed around olives because no one else had olives and they were very chic, but that was the extent of the sharing, and now here it was noon and she had nothing to eat.

She was aghast. What could she do? It would be ridiculous to go around asking “Has anyone seen a tomato sandwich?” They were sure to laugh. She would go to Miss Elson. No, then she would be a ratter, a squealer, a stoolie. Well, she couldn’t starve. She went to the telephone and asked to use it because she had forgotten her lunch. She called and the cook told her to come home, that she would make another tomato sandwich in the meantime.

Harriet left, went home, ate her tomato sandwich, and took to her bed for another day. She had to think. Her mother was playing bridge downtown. She pretended to be sick enough so the cook didn’t yell at her and yet not sick enough for the cook to call her mother. She had to think.

As she lay there in the half gloom she looked out over the trees in the park. For a while she watched a bird, then an old man who walked like a drunk. Inside she felt herself thinking “Everybody hates me, everybody hates me.”

At first she didn’t listen to it and then she heard what she was feeling. She said it several times to hear it better. Then she reached nervously for her notebook and wrote in big, block letters, the way she used to write when she was little.

EVERYBODY HATES ME.

She leaned back and thought about it. It was time for her cake and milk, so she got up and went downstairs in her pajamas to have it. The cook started a fight with her, saying that if she were sick she couldn’t have any cake and milk.

Harriet felt big hot tears come to her eyes and she started to scream.

The cook said calmly, “Either you go to school and you come home and have your cake and milk, or you are sick and you don’t get cake and milk because that’s no good for you when you’re sick; but you don’t lie around up there all day and then get cake and milk.”

“That’s the most unreasonable thing I ever heard of,” Harriet screamed. She began to scream as loud as she could. Suddenly she heard herself saying over and over again, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.” Even as she did it she knew she didn’t really hate the cook; in fact, she rather liked her, but it seemed to her that at that moment she hated her.

The cook turned her back and Harriet heard her mutter, “Oh, you, you hate everybody.”

This was too much. Harriet ran to her room. She did not hate everybody. She did not. Everybody hated her, that’s all. She crashed into her room with a bang, ran to her bed, and smashed her face down into the pillow.

After she was tired of crying, she lay there and looked at the trees. She saw a bird and began to hate the bird. She saw the old drunk man and felt such hatred for him she almost fell off the bed. Then she thought of them all and she hated them each and every one in turn: Carrie Andrews, Marion Hawthorne, Rachel Hennessey, Beth Ellen Hansen, Laura Peters, Pinky Whitehead, the new one with the purple socks, and even Sport and Janie, especially Sport and Janie.

She just hated them. I
hate
them, she thought. She picked up her notebook:

WHEN I AM BIG I WILL BE A SPY. I WILL GO TO ONE COUNTRY AND I WILL FIND OUT ITS SECRETS AND THEN I WILL GO TO ANOTHER COUNTRY AND TELL THEM AND THEN FIND OUT THEIR SECRETS AND I WILL GO BACK TO THE FIRST ONE AND RAT ON THE SECOND AND I WILL GO TO THE SECOND AND RAT ON THE FIRST. I WILL BE THE BEST SPY THERE EVER WAS AND I WILL KNOW EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING.

As she began to fall asleep she thought, and then they’ll all be petrified of me.

Harriet was sick for three days. That is, she lay in bed for three days. Then her mother took her to see the kindly old family doctor. He used to be a kindly old family doctor who made house calls, but now he wouldn’t anymore. One day he had stamped his foot at Harriet’s mother and said, “I like my office and I’m going to stay in it. I pay so much rent on this office that if I leave it for five minutes my child misses a year of school. I’m never coming out again.” And from that moment on he didn’t. Harriet rather respected him for it, but his stethoscope was cold.

When he had looked Harriet all over, he said to her mother, “There isn’t a blessed thing wrong with her.”

Harriet’s mother gave her a dirty look, then sent her out into the outer office. As Harriet closed the door behind her she heard the doctor saying, “I think I know what’s the matter with her. Carrie told us some long story about a notebook.”

Harriet stopped dead in her tracks. “That’s right,” she said out loud to herself, “his name is Dr. Andrews, so he’s Carrie Andrews’ father.”

She got out her notebook and wrote it down. Then she wrote:

I WONDER WHY HE DOESN’T CURE THAT PIMPLE ON CARRIE’S NOSE
?

“Come on, young lady, we’re going home.” Harriet’s mother took her by the hand. She looked as though she might take Harriet home and kill her. As it turned out, she didn’t. When they got home, she said briskly, “All right, Harriet the Spy, come into the library and talk to me.”

Harriet followed her, dragging her feet. She wished she were Beth Ellen who had never met her mother.

“Now, Harriet, I hear you’re keeping dossiers on everyone in school.”

“What’s that?” Harriet had been prepared to deny everything but this was a new one.

“You keep a notebook?”

“A notebook?”

“Well, don’t you?”

“Why?”

“Answer me, Harriet.” It was serious.

“Yes.”

“What did you put in it?”

“Everything.”

“Well, what kind of thing?”

“Just… things.”

“Harriet Welsch, answer me. What do you write about your classmates?”

“Oh, just… well, things I think.… Some nice things… and—and mean things.”

“And your friends saw it?”

“Yes, but they shouldn’t have looked. Its private. It even says PRIVATE all over the front of it.”

“Nevertheless, they did. Right?”

“Yes.”

“And then what happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

Harriet’s mother looked very skeptical.

“Well… my tomato sandwich disappeared.”

“Don’t you think that maybe all those mean things made them angry?”

Harriet considered this as though it had never entered her mind. “Well, maybe, but they shouldn’t have looked. It’s private property.”

“That, Harriet, is beside the point. They
did
. Now why do you think they got angry?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well…” Mrs. Welsch seemed to be debating whether to say what she finally did. “How did you feel when you got some of those notes?”

There was a silence. Harriet looked at her feet.

“Harriet?” Her mother was waiting for an answer.

“I think I feel sick again. I think I’ll go to bed.”

“Now, darling, you’re not sick. Just think about it a moment. How did you feel?”

Harriet burst into tears. She ran to her mother and cried very hard. “I felt awful. I felt awful,” was all she could say, Her mother hugged her and kissed her a lot. The more she hugged her the better Harriet felt. She was still being hugged when her father came home. He hugged her too, even though he didn’t know what it was all about. After that they all had dinner and Harriet went up to bed.

Before going to sleep she wrote in her notebook:

THAT WAS ALL VERY NICE BUT IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MY NOTEBOOK. ONLY OLE GOLLY UNDERSTANDS ABOUT MY NOTEBOOK. I WILL ALWAYS HAVE A NOTEBOOK. I THINK I WILL WRITE DOWN EVERYTHING, EVERY SINGLE SOLITARY THING THAT HAPPENS TO ME.

She went peacefully to sleep. The next morning the first thing she did when she woke up was to reach for her notebook and scribble furiously:

WHEN I WAKE UP IN THE MORNING I WISH I WERE DEAD.

Having disposed of that, she got up, put on the same clothes she had had on the day before. Before she went downstairs she began to think about the fact that her room was in the attic. She wrote:

THEY PUT ME UP HERE IN THIS ROOM BECAUSE THEY THINK I’M A WITCH.

Even as she did it she knew perfectly well that her parents thought nothing of the kind. She slammed her notebook and ran down the three flights of stairs as though she had been shot out of a cannon. She hurtled into the kitchen, collided with the cook, and knocked a glass of water from her hand.

“Look what you’ve done, you maniac. What are you doing running like that? If you were my child, I’d slap you right across the face. In fact, you just watch it, I might anyway,” the cook spluttered in exasperation.

But Harriet was up the stairs again, out of reach. She had only descended to wrest a piece of toast from the cook instead of having to wait in the dining room. She stomped to her place and sat down with a thump. Her mother looked her over.

“Harriet, you haven’t washed, and furthermore it seems to me those clothes look awfully familiar. Go up and change.” Her mother said all this cheerfully.

Harriet was off and running again.
Clackety clack
, her feet went on the parquet floor, then
thrump, thrump, thrump
up the carpeted stairs. She ran all the way into her little bathroom. She had a fleeting sensation of being tired as she stood over the basin washing her hands.

The sun was pouring through the tiny window which overlooked the park and the river. Harriet stared, lost in a sudden dream. She turned the soap over and over in her hands and felt the warm water on her fingers as she watched a tugboat, yellow with a red stack, bob neatly up the river, the frothy V behind it curling into emptiness.

A bell tinkled somewhere downstairs, and her mother called up the steps, “Harriet, you’ll be late for school.” Harriet suddenly woke up and saw that the soap had become a big mush in her hand. She washed it all off then flew down the steps, drying her hands briskly on her dress as she went.

Her father was at the table behind a newspaper. Her mother was behind another newspaper.

The cook waddled in, muttering, “Scared the life out of me this morning. She’ll kill us all someday.” No one paid any attention to her. She gave Harriet a very nasty eye as she served her bacon, eggs, toast, and milk.

Harriet gobbled up everything very fast, slid off the chair, and was out into the hall without either her father or her mother lowering a newspaper. She grabbed up her books and her notebook. As she was flying through the door she heard the rustle of a newspaper and her mother’s voice. “Harriet? Did you go to the bathroom?” All that came back to her mother was a long, distant “Noooooooo,” like the howl of a tiny wind, as Harriet flew through the front door and down the front steps.

Once out of the house she slowed to a dawdle and began looking around her. Why do I run so? she thought. I have only two and a half blocks to walk. She was always early. She crossed East End at the corner of Eighty-sixth and walked through the park, climbing the small hill up through the early morning onto the esplanade, and finally sat,
plunk
on a bench right by the river’s edge. The sunlight coming off the river made her squint her eyes. She opened her notebook and wrote:

SOMETIMES THAT HOUSE GETS ME. I MUST MAKE A LIST OF WAYS TO MAKE MYSELF BETTER.