Sophie Hartley and the Facts of Life (11 page)

“Thad told you
the facts of life?
” Mrs. Hartley said in a faint voice.

“And you, Nora, for warning me about big bosoms.”

Thad choked and spewed out his milk. It sprayed all over Nora. “Thad! You slob!” Nora shouted as Thad bolted for the bathroom with the tail of his tie held over his mouth. She jumped to her feet, knocking over her chair, and dabbed furiously at her clothes with her napkin. “This is my new skirt, you idiot! You ruined it! Oh, and my jacket, too!” she cried, hurling her napkin onto the table. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”

She ran out of the room.

“Bosoms!” John shouted. He fell off his chair and onto the floor, where he rolled around, pounding the rug with his fists and shouting, “Sophie said
bosoms
!”

“Back off!” Maura cried, peering with interest at John over the tray of her highchair. She picked up a pea from her dish and put it into her mouth. Then she picked up another pea and dropped it over the edge. “You big bully,” she said.

Mrs. Hartley and Mr. Hartley stared at each other in amazement.

“What went on while I was gone?” said Mrs. Hartley.

“Apparently, more than I realized,” said Mr. Hartley.

Her mom didn't sound mad, but Sophie wasn't taking any chances. “You should do what I do, Mom, and become a tree. It makes it much easier.” Sophie got up and stood near the sideboard. Steadying her tiara with one hand, she rested her left foot against her right leg and hummed, “Ommm . . .”

“Bosoms!” said John. Maura dropped another pea.

Mr. Hartley gave his wife a weak smile.

“Sorry,” he said. “It fell apart a little sooner than I had hoped.”

“I'm kind of relieved,” Mrs. Hartley said. “I was beginning to think the children had been abducted by aliens and replaced with robots.”

“And we wouldn't want that?” Mr. Hartley said hopefully.

“Bosoms,” John croaked. He was running out of steam.

When Maura dropped another pea, it pushed the Hartley parents over the edge. They burst out laughing. Sophie couldn't remember ever seeing them laugh as hard. Mrs. Hartley had to use her napkin to wipe the tears from her eyes, and Mr. Hartley took off his glasses and used the back of his hand. Every time it seemed they might stop, John gasped, “Bosoms,” and Maura dropped another pea.

It was impossible to become a tree under these conditions.

“Honestly,” Sophie said, putting her foot on the floor. “If you two act so immature about the word
bosoms,
I don't know how you ever managed to have children.”

This sent her parents off on another gale of laughter.

Let them laugh,
Sophie thought, straightening her tiara. Obviously she was the only mature person in the entire family. Even if no one else had any self-control,
she
was going to carry on with the meal.

Sophie picked up the cake and put it on the table in front of her chair. She sat down, took her knife, cut herself a slice that went from the
W
to the
o
and encompassed three balloons, and put it onto her plate.

“Jolly good,” Sophie said, and dug in.

 

 

On the whole, Sophie felt that the conversation about her birthday present had gone very well.

She'd decided to talk to her father about it first. Sophie liked talking to him about things. He could be more reasonable than her mother. Especially when he was watching TV.

Especially when he was watching football on TV.

Sophie checked to make sure he had a soda and a bowl of chips before she perched lightly on the arm of the couch next to his chair and whispered, “Dad?”

She knew from experience that it was a good idea to whisper her requests. When she whispered, he didn't always answer “What'd your mother say?” the way he did at other times.

“Dad?” she whispered again.

Mr. Hartley leaned his head toward her ever so slightly, keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the screen, and said, “Hmm?”

“You know how I always ask for a dog or a cat for my birthday?” Sophie whispered.

“Hmm?” Mr. Hartley said again. Then he suddenly leaped to his feet, shouted “Go! Go! What are you waiting for, you cowards?” and shook his fist at the TV.

Sophie waited patiently until he settled into his chair again and took a swig of his soda before she went on. “I don't want one this year,” she said. “I want a baby gorilla.”

If she absolutely had to, she was prepared to add, “It could be my birthday present
and
my Christmas present.”

Luckily, she didn't have to make such a rash promise. Mr. Hartley gave a little start, as if Sophie had woken him up from a deep sleep, and cried, “What? Oh, Sophie! Wonderful! Run and get me some more chips, there's a good girl,” absently patting her knee as he turned back to the TV.

Sophie hopped up to get the chips. “Wonderful!” he'd said. Her father hardly ever said “Wonderful!” about anything. It was as good as a “Yes” in her book.

 

It took a bit of practice, but she finally did it.

Hunched over the piece of paper on the floor of the family room, holding her pencil between her big toe and the one next to it, Sophie wrote her name in spidery letters with her foot. Her foot kept cramping from the effort, and she had to stop and massage it several times before she could go on.

It was a good thing gorillas had short names, like Kiki. They were easier to write.

Sophie had fallen in love with gorillas after watching a program on TV about a baby gorilla that was being raised by people in a zoo. It wore diapers and drank from a bottle like a real baby. Sophie thought it looked like a real baby, except much cuter.

She had promptly taken out all the gorilla books she could find from the school's media center. She especially liked the one about the woman who'd moved to Africa to live with gorillas and had died trying to protect them.

Passionate, the book called the woman. Sophie loved that word. Deep in her heart she knew she was passionate. She would be willing to die to protect something she loved, too. Of course, she didn't want to have to do it until she was really old, and she didn't want it to hurt.

But she was definitely passionate.

Another book said gorillas had brains like people and were very smart. At one zoo, a scientist named Dr. Pimm was teaching a baby gorilla how to communicate using sign language.

Because Sophie didn't know sign language, and because all these animals seemed to do so many things with their feet, she decided to teach herself how to write with her feet, so she could communicate with her gorilla when she got it.

The idea was a little confusing, even to Sophie, but she kept at it. Her mother wouldn't be able to resist when Sophie told her that gorillas didn't scratch furniture or dig holes, and that Sophie was going to be able to write notes to her gorilla telling it what not to do.

She was about to dot the
i
in her name when two arms wrapped themselves around her neck and a high-pitched voice demanded, “Wide! Wide!”

“Not now, Maura,” Sophie said. She grabbed her baby sister's hands and tried to pry them from around her neck. Maura promptly lifted her feet off the ground, dangling her entire sixteen-month-old body weight down Sophie's back.

It was Maura's newest trick, and very effective. Sophie could barely breathe.

“Maura, no!” she cried, wrenching her sister's hands apart and dumping her on her bottom. Maura wailed and kicked her heels against the floor.

Sophie ignored her.

It was the only thing to do when Maura had a temper tantrum. She had them a lot these days. Mrs. Hartley said it was because Maura was going through the “terrible twos.”

“What do you mean?” Sophie had said. “She's only sixteen months.”

“Well then, she's ahead of herself,” her mother said. “Gifted. All of my children are gifted.”

Sophie personally thought Maura was spoiled. She'd refused to walk for the longest time because so many people in the family were willing to carry her. When Mrs. Hartley made them stop, Maura had started staggering around the house, pulling magazines off tables and books from bookshelves.

Nothing was safe from her grasping hands: pots and pans, dishes on the table, toilet paper, which she delighted in unrolling until all that was left was the cardboard tube. All Mrs. Hartley ever did was say “No, Maura” in a lot nicer voice than she used with everyone else in the family.

For Sophie, the final straw had come the week before. When Maura walked across one of Sophie's wet paintings in her bare feet, Mrs. Hartley had made it sound as if it were Sophie's fault.

“For heaven's sake, work at the kitchen table!” her mother said as she sat Maura on the edge of the sink and held her red, blue, and green feet under the tap.

“But I always paint lying on the floor,” Sophie protested. “I think better when I'm on my stomach.”

“Well, you'll just have to think sitting up until Maura's older,” her mother said. “Honestly, Sophie, use your head.”

Sophie was insulted. She went straight up to her room and drew a picture of a baby with a red face, a huge circle for a mouth, a few teeth, and waterfalls of tears gushing out of both eyes. She wrote
DANGER: FLOOD ZONE
under it and taped it to Maura's bedroom door.

She also decided that since it was obvious her mother wasn't going to teach Maura any manners, she'd have to do it herself.

Lesson number one would be patience.

“You can't have everything you want, the minute you want it,” Sophie said, crouching over her paper again. “I'll give you a piggyback ride when I'm finished.”

Maura stopped kicking the floor and started kicking Sophie's back instead. Sophie scooted sideways on her bottom until she was out of Maura's reach and, using her best teacher-like voice, said, “I'm not going to play with you until you learn patience.”

“Patience? Who're you kidding?” Sophie's older sister, Nora, had made her entrance. She tossed her backpack on the couch and made for the family computer. “Number one, you don't know what patience is, Sophie,” she said scornfully. ‘And number two, Maura's still a baby.”

As she sat down, Nora frowned at the pencil between Sophie's toes. “What're you doing?” she asked. Then, very quickly, “No. Don't tell me. I don't want to know.”

It was too late.

Sophie was so used to Nora's not wanting to hear what she had to say that she took even an idle question as encouragement. If Sophie stopped talking whenever someone in her family wanted her to, she'd never get to explain any of her ideas.

Sophie thought her ideas were interesting.

“One of the biggest differences between primates and Man is that primates don't have thumbs,” she explained to her sister's back. “No, wait. Gorillas
do
have thumbs. They even have thumbs on their feet.”

Sophie cheerfully bopped herself on the forehead a few times and shook her head to rattle her ideas into their proper place in her brain before she went on. “But they can't write, so scientists are teaching them how to speak.”

She cheated a bit by steadying the pencil with her hand as she wrote. “Well, not speak, exactly, but make signs people can read. Sign language, it's called. I thought I'd try to write using my feet to make it equal.”

Nora had stopped typing. She was sitting with her fingers poised above the keyboard, staring at Sophie over her shoulder. When Sophie felt her sister's eyes on her, she looked up and smiled.

It was gratifying to think Nora found gorillas as interesting as she did.

“When I get my baby gorilla, I mean,” Sophie told her. “For my birthday.”

“Do you have any idea how little sense that makes?” At thirteen, Nora had a way of disdainfully curling her mouth whenever Sophie talked, as if Sophie were saying something ridiculous. “Gorillas are learning sign language, so you're going to write with your feet?” she said. “I mean, like, none, Sophie.”

Sophie tried to think back to what she'd actually said. She'd been so intent on putting a little smiley face over the
i
in her name that she couldn't remember. It had sounded all right inside her head.

“I don't know why Mom doesn't have you tested,” Nora said, sighing heavily as she turned back to the keyboard. “Half the time, the front part of what you say doesn't have anything to do with the end part, and the rest is so insane, none of it makes sense.”

“Tested for what?” Sophie said gamely. She found tests interesting. If she didn't always answer the questions the way she was supposed to, it wasn't her fault. Lots of times, there seemed to be more than one answer.

On those horrible end-of-grade tests, Sophie didn't do nearly as well as she thought she should. She blamed the tests.

“I don't know, but there's got to be an explanation.” Nora was typing furiously in response to the little boxes popping up all over the computer screen like tiny message bombs. “It's as if you're not dealing with a full deck or something,” she said, pecking away.