Stacey's Mistake

  See you at the next club meeting!

  Dawn

  “Okay,” I said. “First things first.”

  I had decided to take charge, but being in charge felt funny. Kristy was usually in charge. She was the president, the leader, the one with the big ideas. However, I was the only one who knew all these kids, the only one who knew where the museum was, and the only one who knew her way around Central Park. I was also the only one with keys to the apartment and the only one of us sitters who was a resident of the building. Therefore, I was the only one the doormen would allow to walk outside with the kids.

  I called my friends over. “Kristy,” I said, “you keep Leslie and the Barreras apart. Dawn, you and Mary Anne and I will each calm down one of the criers. Claud, you keep an eye on the rest of the kids. As soon as things are under control, we’ll leave.”

  My friends followed the orders, but I could tell that Kristy didn’t like doing it. Even so, we were ready to leave in just fifteen minutes. As we were letting the kids out the door, I got a great idea.

  “I know how to keep the children together while we walk to the museum,” I whispered to the other sitters. I raised my voice and addressed the kids. “How many of you have heard the story about Madeline?” I asked.

  All but Grace said, “I have!” (I guess Grace was too young.)

  “It’s about twelve little girls who do everything in two straight lines,” I told Grace. “They sleep in two rows of beds and eat at two sides of a long table. And when they take walks, they walk in two straight lines. That’s just what we’re going to do. I want each of you to choose a partner and hold hands. Then one of us sitters will walk with each pair. We’ll have two lines of kids and one line of sitters. Remember to hold hands.”

  It worked. We looked like an army drill team, but the kids seemed to like it, even the older ones. They assembled in the hallway. Then Dennis Deluca commanded, “March!” and we marched down the hall. We squished into the elevator. We marched in place while the elevator zoomed to the lobby. We marched out of the elevator and by the doormen.

  “Hup, two!” Blair called to Isaac and Lloyd at the desk.

  “Have a nice day,” Isaac replied.

  We marched out the front door, which James held open for us, turned left, and marched up the block toward Central Park West. We passed Judy, the homeless woman.

  “Hup, two!” Blair cried cheerfully.

  But Judy was in one of her moods. “They’ll make you eat rotten vegetables! You have to watch out for those theater people!” she replied bafflingly. She was shrieking at the top of her lungs and Grace began to whimper. But Dawn quieted her down right away.

  We reached Central Park West, turned the corner, and marched to the front entrance of the American Museum of Natural History. It was interesting: The baby-sitters were more in awe of the sight of the museum than the kids were. I guess that was because most of the kids pass by the museum at least twice a day, but not my friends. Dawn, Claudia, Mary Anne, and Kristy stopped marching and stood at the wide steps to the main entrance of the great stone building. They gawked.

  “Wow,” said Mary Anne under her breath. “I’ve been here before, but I’d forgotten what the museum looks like. It’s so … so, I don’t know, impressive.”

  “It’s beautiful,” murmured Dawn.

  “Remember that,” I told her. “New York isn’t just burglies and ratties and pickpockets and trash. It’s culture, too. It’s museums and art galleries and theaters and architecture.”

  The children couldn’t have cared less about culture, though. As we stood at the bottom of the steps, they began talking and exclaiming.

  “Can we go the Naturemax Theater?” asked Carlos. “It’s got the biggest movie screen in New York.”

  “I want to go to the planetarium,” said Natalie.

  “Yeah, they’ve got a laser show,” said Dennis.

  “There’s a Sesame Street show,” added Cissy.

  “I just want to see the stars,” said Natalie. “They make me feel at one with the universe.”

  “Huh?” replied every last one of us.

  Then Henry spoke up shyly. “Please can we go inside and see the dinosaurs and animals?” he asked.

  In the end, that was what we decided to do. The planetarium and the special shows cost extra money, and we didn’t have just endless funds. But we could easily afford the general admission to the museum. So we stepped inside, paid our fees, and found a floor plan of the museum. I had brought along a copy of the museum guidebook which Dad had bought the last time we were there. It was really helpful, and us sitters could use it to answer questions the kids might have.

  “Where do you want to go first?” I asked the kids.

  “Wait, I can’t get my button on,” said Blair.

  We’d each been given a metal button with a picture of an animal skeleton and a human skeleton on it when we’d paid our fee. I helped Blair fasten his button to his shirt collar. “Okay, where to?” I said again.

  “Dinosaurs!” cried all the kids except for Peggie, who said, “Gift shop. Puh-lease?”

  “Before we leave,” I told her.

  Dawn was studying the floor plan of the museum. “Dinosaurs are on the fourth floor,” she informed us.

  “Let’s go!” I said.

  We took an elevator up to four, and right away had to make a decision: Did we want to see the Early Dinosaurs or the Late Dinosaurs?

  We started with the early ones and entered a great, high-ceilinged hall. All the kids had been there before, but still they drew in their breaths at the center display in the room. (So did the sitters.) It was really impressive: free-standing, complete skeletons of a stegosaurus, an allosaurus, and best of all, an impressively gigantic brontosaurus.

  Henry Walker stood by the brontosaurus and stared and stared. “I wish I could have seen a real bronto,” he informed me, sounding as if he were on intimate terms with prehistoric creatures. Grace looked frightened and began to cry, though. I ended up having to carry her around while she hid her eyes in fear of the “monster bones.”

  After oohing and aahing and looking up some things in the guidebook, we moved into the hall of the Late Dinosaurs, Grace still in my arms. I like the late dinosaurs better. They’re so wild-looking. And they have more interesting names.

  “Monoclonius,” Peggie sounded out.

  “Styracosaurus,” said Carlos slowly.

  Blair’s favorite, which he couldn’t pronounce, was the corythosaurus, a duck-billed aquatic dinosaur.

  Henry stood gawking in front of another display of giant rebuilt skeletons in the middle of the room — two trachodonts, a tyrannosaurus, and a triceratops.

  We could barely pull him away from the skeletons, but after about fifteen minutes, the other kids (especially Grace) were ready to move on.

  “Please, please, please can we go to the fish place?” begged Cissy.

  I knew what she meant and why she wanted to go there, and I wanted to go, too, even though the ocean-life stuff was all the way down on the first floor.

  “Let’s go,” I told the other sitters. “There’s a ninety-four-foot replica of a blue whale hanging from the ceiling. It’s really amazing. The kids love it.”

  So we headed down to the first floor. We were no longer in our Madeline lines (we felt funny marching through the museum that way), which may explain how we got all the way to the blue whale before we realized that Henry was missing.

  We counted heads three times. We retraced our steps to the elevator. We called for Henry.

  No answer. I felt my knees and stomach turn to water. “We’ve lost a kid!” I cried.

  “Oh, my lord!” said Claudia in a horrified voice.

  “Now just a sec,” said Mary Anne, who usually stays calm in emergencies. “I think each of us should take two kids — well, except for me; I’ll just take Natalie since she’s the oldest — and search one floor of the museum. Stacey, you go to the lower level. Claud, you stay on this floor. Dawn, you go t
o two. Kristy, go to three. And Natalie and I will go back to four. Look very carefully and we’ll meet at the information booth near the main entrance in fifteen minutes. Got it? If we haven’t found Henry by then, we’ll tell a guard or an official or someone.”

  No one argued with Mary Anne. We split up immediately. Sean Deluca and Grace and I searched the restaurants and gift shop on the lower level.

  No Henry. When our fifteen minutes were up, we raced to the information booth. I was in a full-fledged panic. I’d never lost a kid before. Why did I have to lose the first one in the middle of New York City?

  But my fears dissolved when we stepped off the elevator and walked around the corner. Ahead of us was the information booth. And there were Mary Anne, Natalie, and Henry. I ran to them and hugged Henry. Then Grace hugged her brother — fiercely.

  “Thank you, Mary Anne!” I exclaimed. Then I turned to Henry. I was about to scold him when I saw Mary Anne shake her head.

  “He went back to find the brontosaurus,” she whispered to me, “but he was terrified when he couldn’t find us. He’ll stay with the group now.”

  The other sitters and kids showed up then, and my friends and I looked at each other. We grinned with relief.

  Hi Nannie!

  Here I am in New York! They call it the Big Apple. I don’t know why. Have you ever been here? We took ten kids to the American Museum of Natural History. Then we went to Central Park. I didn’t know there would be so many things in the park, but there’s a zoo, a merry-go-round (the Freidman Memorial Carousel), a boat pond, a statue of Alice in Wonderland, an ice-skating rink, and even more. You can go roller-skating, horseback riding, bike-riding, boating, or — Uh-oh, I ran out of room!

  Love, Kristy

  As soon as we’d found Henry, I decided we should leave the museum. We’d been there awhile already, and anyway, the weather was so great I thought the kids would enjoy being outdoors.

  We’d forgotten one thing, though. No one had eaten lunch! So we went to Food Express, a huge fast-food restaurant on the lower level of the museum, and ordered burgers or sandwiches and soda. Leslie and Dawn and I had salad, though. Salad is healthier, and for Leslie it’s safe because of her wheat allergy. I thought she’d kick and scream at the idea of a salad, but she gobbled it up.

  After lunch I was really ready to get outdoors. Unfortunately, a big gift shop is right next to the restaurant, and I had promised Peggie we’d go to it. So we went inside and the kids exclaimed over everything, mostly the dinosaur stuff — mugs and T-shirts and puzzles and charts and stuffed animals. It was Dinosaur Heaven. We didn’t have enough money to buy souvenirs, though, so we looked around for awhile, then ushered the kids outside empty-handed.

  “Now,” I announced triumphantly to my friends, “you are going to see the park to end all parks.”

  “I’ve been to Central Park before,” Mary Anne spoke up.

  “Oh, so you’ve seen the crouching panther statue,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “And you know where the Dene Shelter is, too, I guess.”

  “The Dene Shelter?”

  “Oh, please, Stacey, can’t we do the fun stuff?” cried Cissy.

  “Like what?” I teased her.

  “Like the zoo.”

  “I thought the zoo was closed down so they could rebuild it,” said Dawn.

  “The main zoo is,” I told her, “but not the children’s zoo.”

  “Oh, let’s go there first!” said Grace. It was one of the few things she’d said all day. Basically, she had just cried about the monster bones. And when Mary Anne had asked her what she wanted for lunch, she’d replied, “A hangaber.”

  It was quite a walk to the zoo. I mean, a long one. But walking was the fastest and cheapest way to get there. We formed our Madeline lines again in front of the museum, crossed Central Park West, and entered the park, which spread out before us, at Eighty-first Street. Then, heading south and west, we zigzagged through the park, sticking to paths and roads.

  My friends couldn’t believe what they saw — and what they didn’t see.

  “Right now,” commented Kristy as we walked through a wooded area, “if I couldn’t hear traffic, I’d think we were in some great forest. You can’t see the city at all.”

  It was true. We were walking through a thick grove of trees. Leaves crunched under our feet. We could smell earth and evergreen needles, and, well, it’s hard to describe, but simply that scent of growing things. I had smelled it in Stoneybrook, oh, and in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. But not in too many other places.

  We couldn’t see any buildings or streets or cars or even people.

  At last we emerged from the woods onto a road. Ahead of us was a huge pond. A hot-dog seller had set up his stand by the side of the road.

  “Thank heavens,” I heard Dawn murmur.

  “What?” I asked her. “You hate hot dogs.”

  Dawn looked embarrassed. “Not that,” she replied.

  “Did you think we were going to get mugged back there or something?” I said.

  “Well, you always hear stories about people getting mugged in Central Park,” she said with a little shiver. “And not just at night,” she was quick to add when she saw me open my mouth. “Plus, homeless people live in the park, don’t they?”

  “So?” I replied. “Just because they’re homeless doesn’t mean they’re going to hurt you.”

  Dawn looked away from me. I think she was going to say something else but she set her mouth in a firm line, stared straight ahead, and marched forward with Natalie and Peggie. Our lines had sort of deteriorated by then, but that was okay. The lines were more useful on the street and in the apartment building. We were still holding hands in groups of three, though, and that seemed safe enough.

  We cut across a road and followed a path through what seemed like a more regular park, with trees here and there, benches, playgrounds, a baseball diamond. I barely noticed any of it, since I cut through the park pretty often.

  But my friends, and even the kids (who also come to the park pretty often), kept exclaiming over things.

  “Look! Look at that man! He’s walking … nine dogs!” cried Sean, after counting them furiously.

  “There’s a lady feeding pigeons!” said Grace excitedly.

  “Yeah, a whole flock!” added Henry.

  “Oh, my lord, would you look at that?” exclaimed Claudia.

  I had to admit that what she saw was strange and unusual — even for New York. An old man with a flowing white beard was riding an adult-sized tricycle. Attached to the back of the tricycle was a kid’s red wagon. And riding placidly in the wagon were three fluffy white Persian cats. They looked like the man’s beard.

  “Oh, wow!” I cried.

  My friends turned to me with smiles.

  “Haven’t you seen him before?” asked Kristy.

  “No. Well, not for a few years. I’d forgotten about him.”

  “It’s nice to see you get excited about something,” said Claudia as we walked along. We’d almost reached the zoo.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean, you act like there’s nothing new or exciting in this city. Like you’ve seen it all before and so now nothing really matters anymore.”

  “I do?” I said. That was something to think about.

  We were standing in front of the entrance to the children’s zoo and were about to pay the admission fee, when Peggie cried, “Oh, the clock! The animals are going to dance!”

  The Delacorte Clock. Something else I’d forgotten about. How could I have? Was this what happens when you grow older? Or was I becoming a New York snob? Someone who’s lived in the city for so long that she takes everything for granted? And then a jarring thought occurred to me: Maybe my friends were as exasperated with me as I was with them.

  I shook myself free of the thought as the fifteen of us ran to the nearby clock tower I used to love when I was a kid. It wasn’t just any clock, though. As it struck the hour (
I looked at my watch — two o’clock) the circle of statue animals, each holding a musical instrument, began to revolve slowly.

  We watched solemnly until the song ended.

  Peggie sighed with happiness. (So did I.)

  Then we paid the small fee to enter the children’s zoo. From the outside, it looks like a blah building. But when you cross through the building and go outdoors again, you find yourself in a storybook land. The animals are housed in brightly painted buildings. There’s a castle, a gingerbread house, and even Noah’s Ark with a (fake) giraffe’s head poking through the roof. And you can pet lots of the animals.

  I wished I’d brought my camera along. My friends and I kept pointing at things and giggling.

  “Look!” cried Claudia, nudging me.

  I glanced up in time to see a goat trying to nibble a piece of paper that was in Blair’s back pocket.

  We watched Leslie wrinkle her nose up at a bunny rabbit.

  We watched Natalie talk to some birds.

  “Do you think she’s communing with nature?” asked Kristy.

  My friends and I burst out laughing. I knew we were feeling more like “our old selves,” as my mother would say.

  When the kids grew tired of the zoo, I decided it was time for a rest — and maybe dessert. Lots of vendors were around, and it was hard to pass up every one we saw.

  “Who wants dessert?” I asked the kids as we left the zoo and came across an ice-cream vendor, a popcorn vendor, and a toy vendor.

  Dumb question. The kids wanted everything. The toys were too expensive, but we bought thirteen dixie cups (no ice cream for me or Dawn) and two giant boxes of popcorn. Then we sat down on some wide, flat rocks and ate … and ate.

  “Stacey?” said Leslie when we were finished. “I don’t feel too good.”

  Uh-oh, I thought. I can’t stand to see people barf.

  Dawn remembered that. Without my saying a word, she took Leslie aside. She rocked her and talked to her quietly. Ten minutes later, Leslie hopped up and announced, “Okay! I’m all better! Let’s go!”