Читать книгу The Great Laundry Adventure - Margie Rutledge - Страница 5

Abigail Jacob and Ernest lived in a house without closets. It was an old house: older than your mother or your grandmother or even your great-grandmother. The hallways were excellent for sock-skating, and they joined together rather like a maze (except without closets, there weren’t so many dead ends).

It was a house the children spent a lot of time in because, like many modern children, Abigail, Jacob and Ernest were not free. They did not explore the streets and alleys and ravines looking for adventure. Their outings to High Park or the waterfront or along the Humber River (for our children lived in Toronto) were always with an adult who never let them out of sight. And it was a bother always to be in sight, a bother to the children and a bother to their parents. In warm weather, they played in the back garden, but city gardens rarely have the secret places children most enjoy.

It was lucky that the children had a big, untidy house in which to play, and it was even luckier the children had large, unruly imaginations.

At the time of this story, Abigail was ten years old and the eldest of the three. By the time this story was over, Abigail had grown up a lot very quickly, but that’s jumping ahead. In any case, like both her brothers, Abigail had clear blue eyes. She had beautiful waist-length wavy brown hair and though she could have been very vain about it, she thought of it mostly as a nuisance and often pleaded with her mother to cut it. Her mother resisted because the hair made Abigail look special, as if she were not entirely of her own time.

Jacob, who was seven, had been very blond as a baby, but his hair had darkened somewhat. On first impression, he seemed older than his years, but he had been that way since he was an infant. His height and slenderness, along with the paleness of his complexion, gave him a frail quality, though he was actually quite athletic.

Ernest was four and something of a perpetual motion machine. He was between Abigail and Jacob in colouring and had the same blue eyes. He loved to talk, and his family could always track his location in that big house by the sound of his voice. He talked himself into wakefulness in the morning, talked and muttered through the day and then talked himself to sleep again at night.

But back to the house without closets, for the lack of closets posed a problem for the Lawrence family.

This problem was made worse by the fact that no one in the family had a chest of drawers that worked. Drawers got stuck, or the knobs fell off, and why struggle to put clothes in if you were so soon to take them out again?

Most clothes were kept in the parents’ bedroom: a room with eleven walls (Jacob liked to count them) painted Cleopatra blue. One rarely noticed the Cleopatraness though, because on one side of the room was a four-foot high pile of clean clothes and on the other side of the room was a four-foot high pile of dirty clothes.

Every morning when the children had to get dressed, they would dive into the pile of clean clothes and thrash about until they found socks, a pair of underwear, a shirt and maybe jeans or overalls. No one ever found a pair of socks, and it was a family belief that only nerds wore matching socks. Some mornings the search for clothes was an adventure, and on other mornings it was a catastrophe. The worst days were when the pile of clean clothes would get mixed up with the pile of dirty clothes, and the children’s mother would insist on inspecting everything because she didn’t want her children going out of the house in dirty clothes.

“Disorganization is one thing, but slovenliness is quite another,” she would say while spit-cleaning spaghetti sauce off a shirt sleeve and then handing it to a child. After a momentary burst of attention to domestic detail, the mother would invariably drift downstairs to the piano and play The Queen of the Night’s aria over and over and over. She loved her children very much, but she was a little dreamy.

If the mother was a little dreamy, the father was a man of action, albeit a crusty man of action. For a number of years the laundry situation had bothered him, and for a few years after that, it had troubled him. He was on the verge of real annoyance on the morning he almost had to borrow Jacob’s Boston Bruins sweater (which was about eighteen sizes too small) because he couldn’t unearth a clean sweater of his own.

“This is madness,” Jacob said to Abigail when he saw his father measuring the sweater across his chest. And the father had to agree. There had to be a solution. It was fortunate for the family that Abigail, Jacob and Ernest were imaginative and competent beyond their years.

“Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves!” announced Abigail.

“Huh?” Jacob responded.

“You know—jars full of treasure and jewels and olive oil,” said Abigail.

“Yeah, olive oil,” Ernest agreed.

Jacob, who was sometimes very literal-minded, asked: “You think we should wear olive oil instead of clothes?”

“No, no, no, no,” insisted Abigail. “The jars!”

“What about the jars?”

Abigail let out a deep and impatient sigh. “Don’t you get it?”

“Get what? Am I supposed to read your mind?”

“Jacob, you are such a boy sometimes. If I live to be a hundred, I will never understand boys.”

“And if I live to be two thousand years old, I’ll never understand girls.”

“There’s a lot you wouldn’t understand in two thousand years.”

“Dad!” cried Jacob.

But the father didn’t hear because he was burrowing into another pile of laundry in search of a sweater he could actually wear.

“Mom, Abigail’s being mean to me again!”

But the mother didn’t hear because this morning she was in the bathroom looking in the mirror, trying to figure out how much she had aged in the last week.

“Listen, remember those giant jars the forty thieves hid in?” asked Abigail.

“They all got killed,” said Jacob.

“That wouldn’t happen to us. We live in Toronto and we don’t even hang out with criminals,” Abigail assured her brothers.

“The criminals could keep it secret,” said Ernest.

“Keep what secret?” asked Abigail.

“That they are criminals,” said Ernest.

“Forget the criminals. We’re talking about laundry,” said Abigail.

“Besides which, we can hardly even cross the street without Mommy and Daddy, so I don’t know where we’d meet people dangerous enough or diabolical enough to do us in like the forty thieves,” rationalized Jacob.

“As to the issue at hand,” Abigail began, “we could put laundry instead of treasure in some giant jars. Not only would things be a little better organized, but we’d have a place to hide. Children with closets have places to hide. I’ve done it at other people’s houses and it’s really fun.”

“I want to hide, I really want to hide,” said Ernest, as he jumped up and down on a pile of laundry not containing his father.

“I don’t know where we’re going to get the jars. As far as I know, there are no magic caves around here,” complained Jacob.

“High Park is sure to have some magic caves,” suggested Ernest.

“I’ve never seen them,” said Jacob.

“If we can’t get jars, then we need giant somethingorothers,” insisted Abigail.

“Bachas,” their father gasped, as he surfaced from his dive, a navy blue extra large sweater clutched in one hand.

“Huh?” the children said in unison.

“Baskets. I knew I’d come up with a solution. We’ll go down to Spadina on Saturday and buy as many baskets as we can fit in the car. The Lawrence family will not be defeated by laundry. We will have order in our lives!”

The children were late for school that day, but they had hope in their hearts: their lives were going to change somehow.

The following Saturday, the family drove down to Spadina Avenue to buy baskets. The parents were a little dazed as to where to begin; the mother (who did all the driving) had refused to go into a parkade and had driven up and down the streets of Kensington Market for forty minutes looking for a parking spot. Jacob finally found one tucked between crates of pigeons on one end and dried cod on the other. The mother miraculously managed to parallel park without flattening anything or anybody.

“Now stay together! I don’t want to lose anybody,” ordered their father as they all piled out of the car. “Ernest, stay with me!”

But Ernest was nowhere to be seen.

“Ernest? Ernest!” and then finally, “ERNEST!” screamed their mother, who had long ago lost any self-consciousness about yelling in public.

It seemed as if every creature within a six-block radius turned to stare at the family, and Saturday morning at Kensington Market included a lot of creatures: humans (of course) and dogs and cats and chickens and every other kind of fowl and rabbits and rodents and seafood with great buggy eyes and even a few monkeys. Abigail and Jacob had the feeling that some of the fruits and vegetables were also looking at the family curiously after their mother yelled for Ernest.

As it turned out, Ernest had simply spotted a monkey and followed it down a dark alley. He knew, absolutely, this was something he shouldn’t do, but he couldn’t help himself. The monkey chattered at him, and as Ernest listened, it seemed as if the monkey was speaking a language Ernest could understand. Ernest’s concentration was abruptly fractured by his mother’s hullabaloo, and he followed its echo back to his family.

“Ernest, sweetie!” cried his mother as she scooped him up in her arms.

“Don’t you ever . . .” began his father.

After the reprimand, Ernest told his family that he’d found a shop selling baskets—they just had to follow the monkey. Sure enough, when they looked over to where Ernest pointed, a tiny grey and black monkey with a long tail (the kind of monkey organ grinders used to use) stood waiting for them. Ernest and the monkey led the way and the parents followed. Abigail and Jacob brought up the rear.

“Do you ever think sometimes they’re not quite sure what they’re doing?” asked Abigail.

“You mean Mommy and Daddy?” asked Jacob.

“Yeah,” said Abigail.

“Yeah, I do,” said Jacob.

The two were quiet for a moment.

“Maybe it’s just being a grown-up,” Jacob said, wanting to believe the best.

“No. It’s them,” asserted Abigail with conviction. “They seem so nervous and frightened all the time.”

“Daddy’s not that nervous,” said Jacob.

“He’s nervous about us,” said Abigail. “They both are. They’re scared that something’s going to happen. I mean, don’t you think it’s peculiar that kids always want something to happen, and parents are scared that something actually will?”

And there the conversation ended because the family found themselves in an unnaturally darkened alley in front of a door hung with layers of beaded curtains.

“This certainly is exotic,” said the mother.

“I’m not even sure it’s a store,” said the father.

“It is,” said Ernest as he and the monkey separated the lines of beads and passed through. The other members of the family simply followed.

The interior was completely dark except for Christmas lights draped in waves across the ceiling. It took a few minutes for everyone to accustom themselves to the room. As their eyes travelled from the ceiling down, the family saw richly embroidered kimonos and shawls hung along the walls, shelves crowded with buddhas in all sizes and colours, teapots and woks and mysterious cooking utensils all jammed together in a corner and baskets of every size and shape and colour ajumble in one section of the room.

Only after they had a clear sense of the merchandise did they spot the shopkeeper, a plump little old woman with hair the colour of strawberries and very blue eyelids. Later the children noticed that her eyes were green, but then the red hair and blue makeup were so bright, even in the semi-darkness, that everyone was shocked they hadn’t seen the woman right away.

“You met my monkey,” said the woman in a smoky, old-fashioned movie star kind of voice.

“Yes, we need some laundry baskets,” explained the mother.

“I have just the thing,” the woman said and moved over to the baskets to help the mother and father choose the ones they wanted.

Abigail and Jacob wanted to get a better look at the buddhas, and Ernest stayed with the monkey, who chattered non-stop.

The baskets were surprisingly inexpensive, so the parents bought every one the woman had, thirteen in all. The mother went to get the car while the father and children stayed behind to browse.

“My monkey likes your boy,” the shopkeeper gestured at Ernest.

“Where did you get the monkey?” piped in Jacob.

“I found him alone in the alley and we took to one another right away, just like with your brother. What’s his name?” asked the shopkeeper.

“Ernest,” answered Jacob.

“After Ernest Hemingway,” said Abigail.

“And The Importance of Being Earnest,” added their father.

“He’ll have a happier life than either of those Ernests and many more adventures. As will you all,” predicted the shopkeeper.

Once the mother returned with the car, the family and the baskets were loaded in. When they edged out of the alley, they all were startled by the brightness of the day and the ordinariness of Kensington Market, which hadn’t felt at all ordinary half an hour before.

“Red light up ahead,” their father pointed out to their mother as they drove along College Street.

“It’s half a block away, Brian,” said their mother.

“Just trying to be helpful,” said their father. “I’ll bet we could never find that place again,” he speculated. “It’s green now.”

“I see the light.”

Abigail caught Jacob’s eye, and then they both turned to look out of their respective windows.

“At least we have our baskets,” said Ernest.