Claudia and Crazy Peaches

  She gestured to the yarn and the needles. “That’s all you need. Now if you can knit and purl, and follow the directions, you’ll have a beautiful blanket.”

  “Great!” I picked up the loose end of the yarn and held it up to the needles. “What do I do first? Make some kind of square knot on one of the needles?”

  “Not exactly. Here.” Mary Anne reached for the needles and yarn. “I’ll make it easy for you, and cast on.”

  “Cast on?” I repeated. “I thought I was knitting, not fishing.”

  “Watch.” Mary Anne held a needle in one hand and looped the yarn around it. Her hands moved so fast that I could barely tell what she was doing. She counted under her breath as she worked to one hundred and twenty-five. Less than two minutes later, she held up the needle with the yarn attached to it. “There. Now you’re ready to begin.”

  “You better back up a minute,” I said, suddenly having second thoughts about this whole knitting business. “I have no idea what you just did.”

  “Okay. How about if I do the first row,” Mary Anne suggested. “I’ll go very slowly, so you can follow what I’m doing. Then you can do the second row.”

  I watched her like a hawk. First she stuck the point of the needle under one of the loops. Then she wrapped the yarn around the end of the needle, did a little over-and-under movement and suddenly the yarn was on the other needle. She worked her way across the yarn she’d already attached to the needles, and then handed the knitting to me. “Now you try.”

  “Oh, boy.” I was so nervous I could barely hold the needles. “It’s like trying to use those big kindergarten pencils,” I muttered as I stuck one needle into the loop.

  “Careful!” Mary Anne warned. “Or the yarn will slip off your other —”

  She didn’t finish because the yarn not only slipped off that needle but, when I dove to pick it up, it slid off the other, too.

  “Oh, no,” I cried. “My loops are gone.”

  Mary Anne laughed gently. “I’ll put your ‘loops’ back on for you, but this time watch carefully. I have a feeling you’re going to be doing this a lot.”

  “Maybe those needles are too slippery,” I said as Mary Anne started the poke-and-loop routine again. “Maybe I could find some made out of wood.”

  “Or sandpaper?” Mary Anne giggled. “That would keep the yarn from slipping.”

  I tried to knit again and again. Each time I’d lose the loop, or “drop the stitch” (as Mary Anne said), or just create a great big knot. “Ooooh!” I blew a strand of hair off my forehead. “This is really frustrating.”

  Mary Anne sat back with her arms folded across her chest, smiling smugly. “Actually, it’s kind of fun to see you looking a little uncoordinated.”

  “Fun?” I felt like throwing the ball of yarn at her. Instead I pointed the needles at her and demanded, “What’s so fun about it?”

  Mary Anne covered her mouth, trying to stop laughing. “I’m sorry, Claud, but you are usually Miss Total Artist — always making perfect jewelry and perfect sculptures. It’s just nice to know that even you have difficulty with some creative things.”

  “Hmmph. I bet I wouldn’t have any difficulty tossing this yarn and those books right out the window,” I threatened, reaching for Mary Anne’s tapestry bag.

  “Stop!” Mary Anne held up both hands. “I promise not to laugh anymore. On one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you try to knit one whole row before the meeting begins.”

  The meeting? I’d forgotten all about it. I checked my clock and then looked at the bed in dismay. The meeting was due to start in just ten minutes, and yarn and pattern books were strewn everywhere.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll knit. If you’ll pick up.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  Quickly Mary Anne stacked all the pattern books in a neat pile on my desk. Then she carefully tucked the blanket drawing back under the mattress. After that she dropped the extra balls of yarn into her tapestry bag.

  “How are you doing?” she asked when she’d finished.

  “Well, I’ve done half a row,” I said, still concentrating on my work. “At this rate, Peaches’ baby should get this blanket in time for her high school graduation.”

  “Knock! Knock!” Stacey stuck her head in my room. “Is this a private party, or can anybody join?”

  “Come on in!” Boy, was I relieved to see Stacey. I really did want to learn to knit, but I was fast reaching burnout on my first lesson.

  “What’s going on?” Stacey asked as she took her usual position on my bed.

  I tucked my first efforts into the tapestry bag and then turned to grin at Stacey. “Mary Anne’s been needling me for the last half hour.”

  Mary Anne giggled at my joke and added, “Yeah, and Claud’s been keeping me in stitches.”

  Stacey raised one eyebrow at me. “Those are supposed to be knitting jokes, right? You can’t pull the wool over my eyes.”

  Luckily for all of us, Kristy arrived before anyone could make another crack about being knit-picky or spinning yarns. Shannon, Mal, and Jessi were right behind her.

  Kristy called our meeting to order at exactly five-thirty (of course), and then went right to the point. “I know some of you want to talk about our new charge, Natalie Springer, so, Claudia, why don’t you start?”

  I took a deep breath. “You guys probably remember that when I sat for Natalie last week, she asked me to be her friend. I said, of course I’d be her friend. I mean, that’s not such an unusual thing for a little kid to say. But ever since, she hasn’t stopped calling me. Now she drops by the house all the time and stays for hours. I’m not sure what to do about it. It’s not that I mind her company; I just think she should be playing with kids her own age.”

  “Doesn’t she know any neighbor kids she could play with?” Mallory asked.

  Stacey answered that question. “She knows who the neighbor kids are, but she has a thousand excuses for why she can’t play with them. She asked me to be her friend, too. But after hearing about Claud’s experience, I was a little more cautious in responding to her.”

  Kristy pushed up her visor. “I called Karen last night and asked her about Natalie. Karen says that Natalie is kind of the outcast in her class. It’s not that the kids are mean to her. It’s just that they don’t notice her.”

  “That’s even worse,” I said, wincing.

  “What can we do about it?” Jessi asked.

  Kristy shrugged. “We’ll just have to find Natalie some friends her own age.”

  “But how?” Mal asked.

  “What if we had a party?” Mary Anne suggested. “And each one of us invited a friend for her?”

  “Good idea,” Kristy said, nodding. “But we need more than that. A bigger, overall plan. Kind of a campaign.”

  “A friendship campaign?” Shannon repeated. “That sounds good. Let’s come up with a list of ideas to make it work.”

  Mary Anne held up her pen. “Fire away.”

  Mal raised her hand. (She and Jessi still do that. I think it’s a habit from school.) “What if every time we sit for Natalie, we make arrangements to invite someone over for her to play with?”

  “We could suggest that she join some activities that other charges are involved in,” I said. “Like art classes —”

  “Or dance classes,” Jessi added.

  Mal raised her hand again. “I could ask the triplets to invite her to join their kickball team.”

  “Maybe Natalie could work on a junior fundraising drive for some charity,” Stacey suggested. “Or even lead one. The Diabetes Association is about to launch their fall campaign. If Natalie helped out, she’d be sure to meet people.”

  Mary Anne neatly printed everyone’s suggestions in the notebook. Then the phone started ringing. After we’d assigned our sitting jobs, Kristy took another look at the list. “This is a great start, you guys. If we really do all of these things, Natalie should be the most popular girl in
Stoneybrook.”

  The phone rang one last time before the meeting ended, and Jessi answered.

  “Hello, Mrs. Springer,” she said in an overly loud voice. That quieted everyone. “We were just talking about Natalie, and how much we like her.”

  Jessi listened and nodded several times.

  “You need a sitter for Natalie after school on Wednesday?”

  There was a hasty discussion among the rest of us.

  “Let me take this job,” Shannon whispered. “I’d like to try my hand at the Friendship Campaign.”

  Usually we take the information about a job, and then call the client back to tell them who’ll be sitting, but we were all eager to start helping Natalie, so Mary Anne checked the book and nodded her approval. Kristy gestured to Jessi that Shannon would take the job.

  “Shannon Kilbourne will be there Wednesday afternoon at four on the dot,” Jessi said to Mrs. Springer.

  After Jessi had hung up the phone, Kristy folded her arms and grinned at us. “The Friendship Campaign is off and running!”

  Homework. Yuck. It was Tuesday afternoon, and I had a huge stack of books on my desk. One from each class. I had to write a book report for English (which meant that I also had to finish reading a book). I was supposed to complete a worksheet for math class, and read two chapters for science. My art project waited, untouched, in the corner. It was almost too much. I put my head on my desk, preparing for the long hours ahead of me.

  “Knock, knock.” Peaches stuck her head in my room. “Oops, sorry. I didn’t realize you were napping.”

  I raised my head. “No. Come on in. I’m not napping. I’m thinking.”

  “That makes two of us.” Peaches came into the room and perched on the edge of my bed. “And I’m tired of it. I want to do something.”

  “I know what I have to do,” I said with a groan. “Homework.”

  Peaches wrinkled her nose. “That’s no fun. Why don’t you do it later and come with me?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To the store. I was downstairs looking at cookbooks, trying to plan out a nutritious diet for the baby and me, and suddenly I was famished.”

  “I can understand that,” I said, hungrily eyeing the bag of Mallomars I had stashed between two books on the shelf above my desk.

  “Looking at all of those wonderful cookbooks gave me an idea,” Peaches continued. “I thought, why not make a gourmet dinner, complete with fancy hors d’oeuvres and a scrumptious, ultra-rich, triple chocolate dessert.”

  She’d said the magic word — chocolate. I spun in my chair. “When were you going to do all of this?”

  “Tonight. Now.” Peaches leapt to her feet and grabbed one of my hands. “But I can’t do it alone and there’s no one else here.”

  “What about Janine?” I asked. “She likes to cook.”

  Peaches shook her head. “Janine’s long gone. She went off with her boyfriend. They said something about hamburgers and the library. Not my idea of an exciting date, but …”

  I looked back at my stack of books. The last thing on earth I wanted to do was homework, but I needed to do it. I really did.

  Peaches tugged on my arm. “Come on, Claud,” she pleaded. “It’ll be fun.”

  “But my homework,” I protested weakly.

  “You can do that later. I’ll help you.”

  I remembered that the last time she’d promised to help, a good movie had come on television that she and Russ wanted to watch. I hadn’t had the heart to butt in and ask them to help me. But maybe this time would be different.

  “Okay,” I said. “Just this once. I really can’t make a habit of it. You know what my grades are like.”

  “Hooray!” Peaches jumped with one fist in the air, like a cheerleader. “Come on. This will be a hoot.”

  I soon forgot about my homework as we prepared for the feast of the century, as Peaches called it. First she spread out her cookbooks and we made up a hasty shopping list from the recipes she’d chosen. Then we hopped in her car and took off. It was the craziest shopping trip I’d ever been on.

  “First stop,” Peaches announced as we pulled up in front of a tiny shop with a newly shingled roof. “In Good Taste.”

  “I’ve never been here,” I said, glancing at the display of cans of imported olive oil and brightly colored bins of pasta in the window. “What is it — some kind of gourmet shop?”

  “Exactamundo!” Peaches held open the door for me. “Come in and feast your eyes and tastebuds.”

  “If it isn’t my favorite signorina!” a large man in a white apron called from behind one of the shelves. He stuck his head around the corner and I swear he looked exactly like Chef Boyardee on the spaghetti cans. “Peaches! You are looking more beautiful than ever. How’s the bambino?”

  Peaches patted her stomach. “She’s starved. That’s why we’re here. We want to make the feast of the century.”

  Then Peaches introduced me to her friend, whose name was Giuseppe DeSalvio. “I am most pleased to meet you,” he said, flashing a big warm smile at me.

  Peaches patted Mr. DeSalvio’s arm. “We need the biggest shopping cart you have. Claud and I plan to buy out the store.”

  And we almost did. It was a tiny shop with tight little aisles. One whole wall was lined with gourmet mustards. Another wall held shelf after shelf of weird exotic foods like (ick!) snails and chocolate-covered grasshoppers and ants.

  Peaches didn’t miss a single shelf. “I think we’ll need a couple of jars of those calamata olives and definitely a big can of that olive oil. And, Claudia, grab a couple of boxes of angel hair pasta. Have you ever had this anchovy paste on warm Italian bread? It’s heaven.”

  I didn’t tell her that anchovies in any form make me want to gag. She was having too much fun. I just nodded and said, “Sounds delicious.”

  “We’ll start the evening with stuffed mushrooms, some country paté, and triple cream Danish blue on little rounds of toast.” Peaches didn’t stop after she’d covered the shopping list, and she never seemed to look at the prices, either. She just tossed item after item in her cart. We filled the entire grocery cart with all sorts of strange vegetables that she planned to put in the salad, like radicchio and arugula, and lots of items for appetizers. Peaches had decided the main course would be angel hair pasta with a fresh cilantro pesto, loaded with pine nuts and crushed garlic, topped with freshly grated Romano cheese. “It’s simple, elegant, and yummy.”

  I didn’t even know what cilantro was. Peaches showed me. It kind of looks like parsley but has bigger leaves. I even tasted a leaf in the store (Mr. DeSalvio offered us tastes of everything). It’s really unusual, but I liked it.

  After our cart was filled, Peaches clapped her hands together. “Now for dessert.”

  “Now you’re talking,” I said, eyeing the refrigerated display of chocolate tortes, blueberry cheesecakes, and triple layer cakes. “They all look delicious.”

  “They do.” Peaches draped her arm around my shoulder. “Should we cheat and pretend we made the dessert?”

  By this time my mouth was practically watering. I nodded vigorously. “I have an idea. Let’s eat something here and not even mention dessert.”

  This made Mr. DeSalvio laugh so hard his stomach bounced up and down, just like Santa’s.

  “I’m with Claud,” Peaches said. “Maybe we should just sample one of those cheesecakes, and we’ll take the chocolate torte home with us. How does that sound?”

  The cheesecake, smothered in blueberries, was heaven. It practically melted in my mouth. I could hardly wait for dinner.

  After we said our farewells to Mr. DeSalvio, we headed for ZuZu’s Petals, the flower stand just off Main Street. Peaches bought a huge bouquet of fresh irises for the table. “You can’t have an elegant dinner without flowers,” she explained to me as we climbed back in the car. Next stop was The Connecticut Yankee Gift Shop. Peaches whipped up to the curb and hopped out of the car, calling over her shoulder, “And candles.
We need candlelight.”

  She was back in just a few minutes. “This dinner is going to be so much fun,” Peaches said as she snapped her seat belt in place. “We’ve got the food, the candles, and flowers. Now all that’s left are placecards.”

  “Placecards?” I repeated. “You mean those little nameplates they put next to your glass at fancy dinners?”

  “Exactly.” Peaches grinned. “And I know just the person to make them.”

  “That would be fun,” I said, “but how can I do that and help cook dinner?”

  “Oh, you don’t have to cook,” Peaches laughed. “I’ll do all of that. I just want you to paint something lovely on each person’s card. Do we need to get supplies for that?”

  I thought back to the art supplies tucked away in my closet. I’d used up a lot of them working on my sculpture for art class (which still wasn’t quite done). “I think probably just some poster board would work,” I said. “I have paints. But I do need ink, so that I can use my calligraphy pen for the lettering. They have all that stuff at Art’s.”

  After we circled the block, I hurried into Art’s, bought the ink and poster board, and jumped back in the car. I leaned my head back against the seat. “I feel like we’ve just done the whirlwind tour of Stoneybrook.”

  Peaches smiled sideways at me. “We have.”

  Before we’d left the house, Peaches had written a note for Mom. “Don’t lift a finger. We’re cooking dinner. P and C.” So when we walked in the house, we found Mom, Dad, and Russ, all in the living room, reading the evening paper.

  I carried the shopping bags past them into the kitchen while Peaches made a formal announcement. “This evening’s meal will be at seven P.M. It will be prepared for you by yours truly, assisted by Miss Claudia Kishi. If you will all sit tight, hors d’oeuvres will be served momentarily.”

  Dad put the paper on the couch beside him and grinned at Mom. “Now that’s my idea of the perfect house guest!”

  Peaches and I raced into the kitchen and, with a loud clanging of pans and slamming of cupboards, we hastily put together the appetizers. Peaches really does make everything fun. She and I sang at least three choruses of “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore!”