Moxy Maxwell Does Not Love Stuart Little (2 page)

“The point is,”
Moxy said to her mother, “
Stuart Little
has been with me all summer just in case of in-between.”

“Just in case
one thing ends before the next thing begins, I can pick up
Stuart Little
and get some reading in, is what ‘just in case of in-between’ means,” said Moxy.

Now, Moxy’s mother was not wrong when she pointed out how rare cases of “in-between” were for her older daughter. To the best of her knowledge, she had never witnessed Moxy in between anything: while Moxy was eating lunch, for example, she was already asking what was for dinner. The day she got her puppy, Mudd, she
wanted to know if she could get another to keep him company. Before she could finish one sentence she had often started another.

“Exactly,” Moxy said, agreeing with her mother. “My in-betweens are always interrupted by other things.”

Moxy’s mother stared at her.

“Remember the time I got settled on the porch swing with
Stuart Little
and a glass of lemonade and a yellow highlighter just in case I read something important, remember that?”

Moxy’s mother shook her head. “Refresh my memory,” she said.

“You don’t remember how Pansy practically kicked the swing with her foot when she asked me to tie her shoe and then the lemonade spilled all over
Stuart Little
and ruined my new yellow highlighter and then Pansy didn’t clean it up well enough and a billion ants came the next day?”

Moxy’s mother remembered that.

(Pansy was Moxy’s four-year-old sister, and instead of reading
Stuart Little
this summer she was learning to tie her shoes.)

Here is a photograph Mark took of Pansy’s foot after she asked Moxy to tie her shoe
.

And here is a picture of almost a billion ants
.

“That’s what I mean about being interrupted every time I have an in-between,” explained Moxy.

If Moxy did
not stay in her room and read all of
Stuart Little
, there were going to be “consequences,” Moxy’s mother made clear before she left to do her errands.

Moxy loved errands. Today her mother was going to the bakery to pick up the great daisy cake for the after-show party tonight. Then she was going to pick up Rosie from the groomer. Rosie was one of the Maxwells’ dogs. Mudd was the other. He was part black Lab and part German shepherd and part himself. Rosie was a terrifying
terrier mix with long hair that needed to be done often.

Finally, it would be off to the nursery to buy a fabulous new and improved fertilizer for the dahlias, which is the name of the flowers Moxy’s mother grew in her famous dahlia garden.

This is a not-very-good photograph of Moxy’s mother’s dahlia garden. It was taken by Mark Maxwell very early this morning
.

How Moxy longed
to go! It was the perfect sort of errand outing—there was no dry cleaning involved. No stopping at boring places to pick up boring things, like resoled shoes. Waiting for fertilizer would be boring, but—thought Moxy, who was really beginning to think now—I could use the extra time to really dig in and begin
Stuart Little
.

“But Mother, don’t you see—it’s the perfect in-between. I’ll stay in the car with
Stuart Little
while you go in and buy fertilizer.”

“No.”

There had been
a certain something in the tone of her mother’s “no,” so even before the car backed down the driveway, Moxy went to her room and moved a few things off her bed and sat down and began to consider the possibility of actually reading
Stuart Little
.

First, of course, she would have to clean her room. A book of this magnitude—144 pages—required a great deal of space.

Just as Moxy was about to roll her sleeves up and get down to business and really dig in, Sam called.

This is a fabulous photograph Mark Maxwell took of Moxy’s room after she’d answered her phone and before she’d started cleaning
.

“I’m sorry but I can’t talk now,” said Moxy. “I’m very busy.”

“It’s Sam. What are you doing?”

Even though Sam was only six and Moxy was already nine, Moxy considered Sam her best friend. That’s because Sam did whatever Moxy said: when Moxy wanted to practice being a ballet star, Sam would catch her like
that!
in his arms. When Moxy read aloud from the list of 211 Career Paths she was considering, Sam added suggestions of his own. Moxy had never, for example, considered being a shepherd or writing an advice column for senior citizens. Without Sam she never would have thought of either one.

The truth was, Sam had a little crush on Moxy, though Moxy pretended not to notice and Sam didn’t really understand it. All Sam knew was that Moxy always had a plan and when Moxy had a plan something always
happened. Like last summer when they had picked up golf balls from the seventh green of the Forest Hills golf course and washed them off and sold them back to golfers for twenty-five cents apiece. It was always interesting to be with Moxy.

“I’m cleaning my room,” Moxy explained. “It’s a bit messy. Which is the main reason I haven’t been able to get around to reading
Stuart Little
yet.”

“Another reason is
because I’ve been trying to train Mudd,” Moxy continued. She was speaking to Sam from her new shocking pink cell phone. “Do you think I should call Mom and remind her of that?”

“But training Mudd is number two on your list of stuff you wanted to get done,” said Sam. “Reading
Stuart Little
is number one.”

“Oh, Sam! If we don’t hurry and train Mudd, he will never become a show dog,” said Moxy.

“No, he won’t,” said Sam. Though Sam
wasn’t sure of the cutoff date for turning regular dogs into show dogs.

“And you know what that means?” asked Moxy.

Sam couldn’t remember.

“It means I will never get to run-walk Mudd around Madison Square Garden in a pair of cute flats on national television. I might just as well cross it off my list of Possible Career Paths.”

Though Moxy had
not gotten around to actually training Mudd, thinking about training Mudd had consumed a fair amount of her time this summer. One thing she had figured out was that to train Mudd, someone needed to train Rosie first. That’s because Mudd did whatever Rosie said. If Rosie barked, “We will now eat pillows,” Mudd ate pillows.

The other problem with training Mudd was that Mudd had a serious barking problem. Mudd barked at everything that
moved. He barked at a leaf blowing down the street and a butterfly beating its wings and the UPS man delivering packages to Mr. Cloud’s house five blocks away. In fact, most of the time he was so busy barking he couldn’t hear Moxy when she told him to stop barking.

Just another reason, thought Moxy, that she had reached the end of August without reaching the beginning of
Stuart Little
.

This is the part
where the story really starts to heat up. The part where it gets a little dicey for Moxy. “Scary” is the word Pansy later used. “Out of control” was the phrase Moxy’s stepfather, Ajax, mumbled for some years after. Mark called it “a chain of astonishing events” and left it at that.

Since I am the first to tell this story, you will have to accept my version of what happened next, and I am quite inclined to agree with Moxy when she called this “the Third-Worst Day of My Life.”

As soon as
Sam hung up, he called Moxy back. “I’ll come over and watch you read if you want,” said Sam. He was always looking for a reason to be around Moxy.

But Moxy wasn’t listening. She was looking up the word “consequences” in the dictionary, and it was beginning to make her feel a little ill. It interested Moxy a great deal that a single word—twelve letters that could be erased with a #2 eraser—was powerful enough to make her feel as if she might throw up.