Mary Anne + 2 Many Babies

  “Yes, with palm trees and beautiful seashells.”

  The phone rang again.

  I sprinted into Dad and Sharon’s room. So did Dawn. We grabbed the receiver at the same time. “Hello?” we said.

  “Hello?” said Dad and Sharon on the other extension.

  “Hello?” said a fifth voice.

  “Logan?” I asked.

  “Mary Anne?”

  “Okay, everyone can get off the phone,” I said. “We haven’t inherited an island. This is just Logan calling.”

  “Just Logan?” he repeated. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Don’t be insulted,” I told him, giggling, as the rest of my family went back to being tired. “It’s just that — Oh, never mind. It’s a long story.”

  “Oh. Well, I was calling because … You won’t believe this, but good news! Sammie is walking, and I captured the event on videotape.”

  I began to laugh again. “A Kodak moment?” I suggested.

  “Definitely.” Logan was laughing, too.

  I knew he was calling so we could talk things out, so we could make up once and for all. “How is Sammie really?” I asked.

  “She’s fine. How were the twins this afternoon?”

  “A mess. They’re teething. I’m glad you were taking care of Sammie today. I could never have handled her and the twins. As it was, Dawn had to come over and help me.”

  “Wow. I hardly ever hear you say you can’t handle a sitting job.”

  “Sitting is different when babies are involved.”

  “Yeah. Mary Anne? I’m sorry we’ve been arguing.”

  “Me, too,” I answered. “It’s Sammie and Modern Living. That’s why we’re arguing. Mrs. Boyden is asking us to do something really difficult — be adults, be married, have babies, and at the same time be kids in school. I’m glad she didn’t give us real babies. Can you imagine what shape we’d be in now?”

  “For one thing, we’d be broke. Dad took Hunter to the pediatrician for a checkup the other day, and you know what that visit cost? Seventy-five dollars! Seventy-five dollars when nothing was wrong with him in the first place. And we still haven’t gotten the bill from the lab for the tests they’re doing. Who knows how much that will be for. I don’t know how my parents can afford to raise three children. Kerry and Hunter and I are expensive!”

  “Well, we already know we can’t afford even an egg right now, but I didn’t expect us to argue so much. I thought that when two people got married they just moved into a nice little place and began hanging curtains and planting flower gardens.”

  “You mean they played house?”

  “I guess so. I never thought about stuff like what to do if you can’t find a baby-sitter. Or if you and your husband couldn’t agree on how to raise a baby.”

  “Maybe when you’re older you can figure those things out more easily.”

  “Maybe. I don’t think that being older solves everything, though. Look at Dawn’s mother and father. Or Kristy’s mother and father. Or Stacey’s mother and father.”

  “Yeah. But I bet you have a better chance at a relationship if you wait awhile. Until after college or something.”

  “Probably.”

  “I mean, we couldn’t get married now,” said Logan.

  “We? You and I? Get married now?” I squeaked. “I’ll say we couldn’t. I want to enjoy the rest of eighth grade first. I want to enjoy being thirteen and not have to worry about all those things I’ll have plenty of time to worry about when I’m twenty-two or something.”

  “Yeah. I would like to play baseball without first having to think of who’s going to watch Sammie. That would be a luxury. I’m not ready for so many complications.”

  “Me, neither. Logan, I really like you. I hope you know that.”

  “I do.”

  “But I’m not ready to be your wife, or anyone else’s wife.”

  “That’s cool. I’m not ready to be a husband.”

  “Do you think this is the kind of material Mrs. Boyden wants us to include in our report? What we learned about ourselves?”

  “Probably. I think she wants us to consider ourselves as couples and also as the single parts of couples. Remember the questions she asked at the beginning of class one day? The day Shawna said she wanted to divorce Miles?”

  “Yeah. Plus we learned some things about loyalty and trust and independence and responsibility. Maybe we should divide our paper into two sections. In one, we’ll describe what we learned about ourselves. In the other, we’ll describe what we learned about relationships; about the aspects of relationships.”

  “That’s a great idea,” agreed Logan. He sighed.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Nothing. I’m just sitting here looking at Sammie. When this project is over, I’ll kind of miss her.”

  “Me, too.”

  “But not too much.”

  “No, not too much.” I paused. “I wonder what Mrs. Boyden will do with our babies when we don’t need them anymore.”

  “I don’t even want to think about it.”

  “Neither do I. I guess I should go now, Logan. I haven’t started my homework yet. But I’ll see you and Sammie in school tomorrow.”

  “Okay. ’Bye, Mary Anne. Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  We hung up. I headed to my room but detoured down the hall to Dawn’s room instead. I entered it and sat in her armchair.

  “What did Logan want?” asked Dawn. She was seated at her desk, writing up a lab report for science class, but she stopped and looked at me. She stuck her pencil in the pencil jar.

  “To talk about Sammie. Nothing special, though. You know what I’ve been thinking, Dawn?”

  “What?”

  “About the Kumbel catalog. You can throw it away.”

  “I can? How come?”

  “Well, what’s your opinion about my dad and your mom having a baby now? I mean, what’s your opinion since you spent the afternoon with a fussing, teething baby?”

  “Oh.” Dawn looked sheepish.

  “Because I was thinking,” I went on, “that maybe it isn’t a very good idea after all. Not that we couldn’t take care of a baby just fine. We are professional baby-sitters. But a new baby might be rough on our parents at their age. Not that they’re old —”

  “Of course not,” interrupted Dawn. “But they might not be strong enough to go through teething.”

  “Or to toilet train a kid.”

  “Plus, they need their sleep now. How could they get up every three hours during the night to feed a newborn?”

  “They couldn’t. And in about ten years the kid would want to go to Disney World. Do you think Dad would ride Space Mountain with our brother or sister?”

  “No way. Mom probably wouldn’t, either.”

  “And you and I would be out of college and living on our own by then,” I pointed out. “So we wouldn’t be any help.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where is the Kumbel catalog?” I asked.

  Dawn found it in her closet. We opened it to the baby pages we had marked, and we gazed at the pictures.

  “Not having a baby will save a lot of money, too,” I said, looking at the prices. Baby equipment was not cheap.

  “But that little lamp is awfully cute,” said Dawn wistfully.

  “Well, save your pennies,” I said. “Maybe one day you can buy it for your own room.” Dawn closed the catalog. I stood up. “I’m still curious to know what our baby brother or sister would have looked like.”

  “And I think it would have been neat if our parents had had a baby of their own. A little Schafer-Spier.”

  “But I guess it wasn’t meant to be.”

  “I guess not.”

  It was the last session of our Modern Living class. The following week we would begin a new course — Health. No one was very interested in it, but we had to take it, so complaining was no good. (Miles tried to look on the bright side. “Isn’t sex education part of He
alth?” I heard him say. Logan laughed. I blushed.)

  Logan and I walked into Mrs. Boyden’s class together. I was carrying Sammie in her basket. Logan was holding our precious term paper. It was 32 pages long, typed, single-spaced. Well, actually, word-processed, not typed. Logan had printed it out on his home computer.

  We took our seats, and I set Sammie on my desk. Logan and I watched the room fill up with our classmates and their eggs. Mrs. Boyden was at her desk, thumbing through her lesson book. When the bell rang, she closed the book and stood up.

  “Well,” she began, smiling, “you’ve made it. You survived.”

  “We didn’t,” said Angela. “Kevin and I lost Cathy. We —”

  “I meant you survived as married couples,” Mrs. Boyden replied gently. “And I’m proud of all of you. Some very heavy issues have been discussed in this class, along with some very personal feelings. Your honesty is what made the class a success. Also, your ability to suspend disbelief. If you hadn’t been able to pretend your eggs were babies, you wouldn’t have learned so much.

  “Today,” Mrs. Boyden went on, “I would like each husband and wife to pair up and write a short composition, which will be handed in with your final papers. The subject of the composition is saying good-bye to your children. The time is now twenty-one years in the future. Your babies have grown up, become adults, and finished their schooling. They are ready to leave you and lead lives of their own.”

  “Logan,” I whispered, feeling tearful, “Sammie doesn’t need us anymore. She’s going to leave us!”

  “At the end of the class,” said Mrs. Boyden, “you will leave your eggs behind. They will no longer be your responsibility.”

  “What are you going to do with them?” asked Shawna.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  Shawna shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay. Break into your pairs, then.”

  I slid my desk over to Logan’s desk, bringing Sammie with me.

  “So?” said Logan. “Where’s Sammie going?”

  “Off to her first important job,” I answered. “In New York.” (New York is where I hope to land my first important job.)

  “We’re going to let our baby move to big, dangerous New York City?”

  “Dear, she’s not a baby anymore,” I reminded my husband. “She’s an adult. She’s twenty-one. And she’s been offered a position in a publishing house. She will be an editorial assistant. We can’t hold her back.”

  “You’re right,” agreed Logan.

  We wrote our composition and added it to our paper.

  After we had handed in our work, I looked at Sammie and said, “I guess this is good-bye. You’ve been a real —”

  “A real good egg?” Logan interrupted.

  I made a face at him. But I didn’t say anything. I knew he was joking around because he didn’t want to get sentimental in class, where everyone could see him. Some men have such a hard time dealing with their emotions.

  * * *

  That afternoon our BSC meeting was attended by seven humans and no eggs. Although earlier I had been sad about letting Sammie go off to New York, I was now feeling quite free. I wasn’t the only one.

  Stacey bounced into club headquarters crying, “Freedom at last!” She sounded the way most kids do on the day summer vacation starts. “No more mixing bowl,” she went on, “but I do miss Bobby … sort of. Well, just a teensy bit.”

  At 5:28, Jessie ran into the room, the last club member to arrive. As she settled onto the floor next to Mallory, she looked around, then asked, “Where are your babies?”

  “Gone,” said Kristy sadly.

  “They grew up,” added Dawn.

  “Mine went to New York to start a career,” I said.

  Jessie and Mal did not know what we were talking about, so we described our last Modern Living class to them.

  “Cool. What are the rest of your children doing?” asked Mallory.

  “Bobby is going to teach high school history,” said Stacey.

  “Izzy became a car mechanic,” said Kristy. “He opened a garage in Stamford. I made him promise to visit every Sunday.”

  “My baby is going to become a famous artist,” said Claud. “Naturally.”

  “Mine’s in medical school,” said Dawn.

  The phone rang then, and we arranged a job for Claudia with the Newtons.

  “You know what I think?” I spoke up after a break in the conversation. “I suppose if I absolutely had to, I could raise a child of my own. But I wouldn’t want to. I’m too young.”

  “Also, your dad isn’t ready to be a grandfather,” said Stacey.

  “No, I’m serious, Stace. I’m not kidding around. Do you think you could be a parent right now? I mean, if you’d just given birth?”

  Stacey frowned. “No. I really don’t. How would I support a baby? Anyway, I don’t want to be a parent. Not yet.”

  “You’re right,” I agreed. “I could only raise a baby if I lived at home and Dawn and Dad and Sharon helped me. I couldn’t do it by myself.”

  “I do want to have kids someday, though,” said Dawn.

  “Definitely!” agreed the rest of us.

  “But maybe when I’m older,” she went on. “When I’m twenty-five. Maybe even thirty. You know, now lots of women are having their first baby when they’re forty. Or older. I’m not in any hurry.”

  “Me, neither,” I said, “but I don’t want to wait until I’m forty. Twenty-five sounds like a good age.”

  “I’m going to have eight children, like my mom did,” commented Mal.

  “It’s a good thing you won’t have them all at once,” replied Stacey. “You might want to quit after one or two.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, I don’t have to decide now.”

  “And in two years you’ll take Modern Living,” said Kristy, “and you can do a trial run with just one egg-baby.”

  “I hope my first baby is a girl,” said Jessi dreamily. “I will name her Mary Rose. I’ve always wanted a daughter named Mary Rose.”

  The phone rang again then, and our meeting became busy with BSC stuff. No one mentioned the eggs again.

  * * *

  When Dawn and I reached home that evening, we received a call from Sharon, saying she and Dad would be about half an hour late and asking us to start dinner. So we did. As we took things out of the fridge and set them on the kitchen table, Dawn said, “Mary Anne, do you think you’ll ever be able to eat eggs again?”

  I shook my head. “Not for a long, long time.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  My sister and I began chopping vegetables for a salad. “I sure am glad,” I said, slicing a carrot, “that we didn’t say anything more to our parents about having a baby.”

  “Whew, I’ll say,” agreed Dawn.

  “Can you imagine if we had convinced them and your mom had gotten pregnant right away and then we had finished Modern Living and had changed our minds?”

  “We would have been a little late.”

  “Yeah, just a little.”

  “Is being a little late like being a little pregnant?” Dawn asked.

  I laughed. “I guess so. Either you are or you aren’t.”

  Dad and Sharon entered the kitchen just in time to hear that last part of our conversation.

  “Who’s having a baby?” asked Dad suspiciously.

  “No one, thank goodness,” I answered. “No one we know of.”

  “How’s dinner coming, girls?” asked Sharon.

  “It’s ready,” I said.

  “Let’s eat,” said Dawn.

  “Let’s eat in the dining room,” added Sharon.

  “Ooh, special occasion?” I asked.

  Sharon shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not.”

  We sat at the dining room table and passed around the salad and this Chinese vegetable dish Sharon makes and brown bread and these vegetable patties that are supposed to look like hamburgers but don’t.

  When our plates were
full, Sharon looked at Dawn, then at me, and smiled. “Girls,” she said, “Richard and I have been thinking about your wish for a baby. You haven’t mentioned it for awhile, but we know that doesn’t mean you aren’t still thinking about it.”

  I know my face turned pale then. I felt faint. Across the table from me, Dawn’s eyes widened to the size of basketballs, and her hands began to shake. Oh, no. Why couldn’t parents just forget things once in awhile? Why did they have to remember everything?

  “Um,” I said.

  “Um,” said Dawn.

  “See, the thing is, Dawn and I talked about it and we realized we shouldn’t have …” My voice trailed off.

  “Don’t worry,” said Sharon. “It’s okay. Richard and I have discussed everything and we decided if you really want something to care for, you may get another pet. Tigger might like some company.”

  I let out the breath I was holding. Oh, a pet. I managed a grin at Dawn, who grinned back. “Do you want a pet?” I asked her.

  “Do you?” Dawn countered.

  “Not really. Tigger’s enough.”

  “That’s how I feel…. But thanks, Mom. Thanks, Richard.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” I said.

  Dad looked surprised. “We thought you’d jump at the chance to get another pet.”

  “We might have, if it weren’t for Modern Living,” I replied.

  “Modern Living?”

  “Yeah. Dad,” I said, “you have no idea how hard it is to be a parent.”

  * * *

  Dear Reader,

  In Mary Anne + 2 Many Babies, the members of the Baby-sitters Club take care of many infants. If you are going to baby-sit for an infant, it is important to be prepared. Baby-sitting for an infant is very different from sitting for an older child. You might think it will be easy because you don’t have to entertain an infant. Wrong! If you’re going to sit for an infant, there’s a lot you need to know. Babies can’t tell you what they need, so you have to be prepared. In fact, don’t be surprised if parents with a new baby don’t call you right away with a sitting job. There’s a good chance they may ask a sitter who’s older, or even an adult. A good way to show clients that you are capable of taking care of a new baby is to take an infant care course. Check with the Red Cross or the Y in your community to see if they offer such a course. When I was thirteen, I took a course at my church. Another way to learn how to take care of a baby is to start out as a parent’s helper — helping out while the mom or dad is at home. Believe me, they’ll welcome the help!