Moxy Maxwell Does Not Love Stuart Little (3 page)

Here is a close close-up picture Mark took of the definition of the word “consequence” from the Random House dictionary
.

When Moxy didn’t reply, Sam imagined he heard the words “Come right over!” in Moxy’s silence and set out for the Maxwells’ house.

By the time he reached their front porch, Moxy’s room was clean. All the old ice cream bowls and clean and dirty towels, all the magazines and general damp debris that always accumulates over the months of June and July and up through the first twenty-three days of August in the room of a nine-year-old Moxy, had been swept sort of neatly under the bed.

“Take a picture of it, Mark! It may never look this good again,” said Moxy to her brother, who was standing in the doorway watching her.

Moxy could be pretty bossy.

“But you can still see the whole mess,” he said. “Dirty clothes are practically crawling out from under your bed.”

Here is the photograph Mark Maxwell finally took of Moxy’s room after she cleaned it. Moxy called it the “after” photograph
.

Moxy was just
about to get down to the serious business of looking at the pictures in
Stuart Little
when she had an idea so wild, so unlikely, so stupendous, that when she recounted it later, her flabbergasted stepfather said, “And you thought of this all by yourself?”

Moxy’s amazing idea was to turn her cell phone off so that she could concentrate on reading
Stuart Little
.

(Let us pause.)

“The sheer genius of it!” Moxy’s stepfather later whispered to Moxy’s mother.

A single word
stopped her. That word was “extreme.” “Extreme” was a word she had learned from her stepfather. “You have a tendency to go to extremes,” he sometimes said when she had a good, if unusual, idea. Like last Wednesday when she had proposed that the family eat only foods that were white, such as bread and rice and milk and some puddings.

Moxy’s stepfather’s name was A. Jackson Maxwell and he was a famous children’s book writer. Moxy and Mark called him
Ajax because “Mr. Maxwell” was too formal and “Jackson” was too long. Pansy called him Dad because Ajax
was
her dad, and Mrs. Maxwell called him Bunny. But that is not part of this story and will sidetrack us and we must move on if we’re ever going to get to the darkness now descending on Moxy’s horizon.

It turned out that “extreme” was just the sort of word Moxy was looking for as she debated whether to turn her cell phone off so she could concentrate on reading
Stuart Little
. If she didn’t turn off her cell phone when she practiced her daisy routine or when she ate supper or when she went to sleep, wouldn’t turning off her cell phone to read
Stuart Little
be extremely
extreme
or even more extreme than that?

Moxy was just about to invent a word for “more extreme than extremely extreme”
when she remembered the word “consequence,” which reminded her that she had to read
Stuart Little
. And at that very instant, just as she was looking about for the book, Mudd began to bark and bark and bark and bark and bark and bark and bark and bark—yet another example of an interrupted in-between!

“No bark! No bark!” Moxy said sharply. But as I’ve said, you couldn’t really stop Mudd from barking. Moxy tried again. “No bark! No bark!”

Mark took this picture of Mudd barking at Sam
.

It turned out that Sam was outside swinging on the porch swing.

“Mark!” Moxy called out. “Why don’t you try and help once in a while? I can’t make Mudd stop barking all by myself!”

“I can’t interfere with what the camera sees,” said Mark.

“Whatever that means,” said Moxy.

“See what I mean about training Mudd before it’s too late?” she said as Sam walked in. Then she added, “Why is he barking at you? He’s known you for like three years.”

“How is
Stuart Little
going?” asked Sam.

“I’m feeling a bit weak after cleaning my room and all,” said Moxy. “I think I’d better go have a sandwich or something to get my strength back before I start reading
Stuart Little
.”

“It
is
a hundred and forty-four pages,” Sam agreed.

This is the photograph Mark took of the note Moxy found on the refrigerator door when she entered the kitchen
.

Moxy did not
cry. She did think she might throw up. But since she despised throwing up (though she liked the word “despise”), she decided to eat a peach instead.

“May I have one too?” asked Sam. But by then Moxy was already headed for the backyard. Sam took a peach, bit into it, and followed Moxy to the hammock.

“Let me help,” he said. He put the peach between his teeth and held the hammock still so Moxy wouldn’t have to struggle to get in.

“Thank you, Sam,” Moxy said. Then she lay back in the hammock and looked at the sky.

Moxy needed to get organized. She needed a plan. She needed another peach. Another peach would help her think. Once more Sam held the hammock still, and Moxy struggled out. Sam wasn’t sure where they were going next. So he just followed her.

Two minutes later Moxy and Sam wandered into the kitchen again. They found Pansy there. She was standing on the counter eating a peach.

Moxy began to pace. This was a clear sign to Pansy and Sam that Moxy was thinking very hard. They’d seen Moxy think before and this was exactly how it looked.

Moxy was thinking
about inventing a hammock that automatically stopped moving when you decided to get out.

She did not even glance at the clock. She did not know that time was running—sprinting is the better word—out. It was thirteen minutes after two o’clock.

Mark calls this photograph “The End of Time: Still Life with Peaches and Moxy’s Right Arm.”

And then, just as she was about to throw the first peach pit away, it happened.

Actually, Moxy’s mother
disagreed when she found out about it. But at the time, as Moxy said later and many times over, it seemed like a fabulous, stupendous, near-genius idea.

“A peach orchard,”
said Moxy as she bit into a peach, “is the only thing that will save me.” Then she added, taking a fourth peach, “Thank goodness I’m me. Otherwise I wouldn’t have come up with this fabulous, stupendous, near-genius idea, and then where would we be?”

Pansy and Sam leaned ever so slightly (you wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t told you) toward her.

The kitchen clock hummed like a mosquito; the
pad, pad
of Ajax’s fingers on his laptop upstairs sounded like thunder.

“You’re going to have to go out there and plant a peach orchard right now,” said Moxy, pointing at the backyard. “And thank you for your help,” she added. She knew that saying thank you encouraged people to help you even more.

She handed Sam the peach pit she’d been holding in her hand. “Start with this,” she said. “Please.” “Please” was also a very helpful word. It encouraged people who might otherwise quit to keep going.

Sam and Pansy stared at Moxy.

“How else are we going to pay for my college education?” she said. It was all so obvious.

Pansy had not blinked since—I don’t know—two pages ago, so she did.

“Don’t you
get
it?” Moxy was growing the tiniest bit impatient. “When Mother sees that I can make enough money selling peaches from my peach orchard to pay for my entire college education—and possibly
dental school too, if that’s a Career Path I happen to choose—she’ll say to Ajax, ‘That Moxy is so smart, why on earth does she need to read a book about a mouse!’ ”

Moxy was not convinced that Sam and Pansy were using their quiet time constructively. “We haven’t got time to stand around staring at nothing!” Moxy exclaimed. “The whole orchard has to be planted and watered before Mother gets home.”

Moxy went back
to the hammock and lay down. She was exhausted. She’d been on an emotional roller coaster for most of the day.

Granted, there were a few problems with the Peach Orchard Plan. For example, it might take as long as three months for the peach pits to grow into peach trees. But all in all, it was a good idea. Moxy sent Pansy to the garage to get the shovel.

It was a perfect day. There was a light September breeze, but the sun was an
August sun, a warm sun. It occurred to Moxy that she should start reading
Stuart Little
just in case her mother did not immediately grasp the magnitude of the Peach Orchard Plan.

Moxy was ever so slightly annoyed when Pansy started digging underneath the hammock. “Over there,” said Moxy. “There’s plenty of room for a peach orchard over there.” She pointed to a sunny stretch of lawn a few feet from her mother’s prize garden. Its location would please her brother, Mark, because he would no longer have to mow that part.

Moxy settled back and considered the curious fact that she had preferred cleaning her room to reading a book. It was peculiar because Moxy hated cleaning her room. She hated cleaning her room so much that cleaning her room was number two on her List of Things She Hated to Do.