bed 0 ¢
Bottom of the laundry bag 12 ¢
Pockets of everything I own 12 ¢
A grand total of fifty-eight cents!
Math Problem:
Vivian needs a white leather diary with gold all around the edges. The cost of the diary is $3.79. After doing a thorough search of her entire room, she found a measly 58¢.
1. How much more money does Vivian need to buy the diary?
2. What’s the best way for Vivian to get the money she needs?
My life is no picnic. Deena, the most popular kid in the whole school, had a bicycle all her life, and white furniture, and a backyard with grass. Then there’s Shelly. Cool Shelly with her perfectly ironed blouses that stay tucked in and pure white bobby socks that always stay up. I’m the one stuck with ugly hand-me-downs—second-hand clothes from people I don’t even know. I’m the one with torn-at-the-toes socks that creep their way down into my scuffed-up Oxfords. Every time I ever need anything, Mom says, “I hope you understand, dear, but you’ll just have to wait for a good payday.” Then payday comes along, and so does the phone bill or a brake job for the old Studebaker. Dad’s car is older than I am, and it has rust all around the edges. He just laughs and calls it his lace-trimmed chariot. On days when Dad gives me a lift in the morning, I ask him to drop me off a block away from school. “The walk is good for my lungs,” I tell him, and he believes me. He doesn’t know that I’d rather die than have any of the other kids see me getting out of his rusted-out jalopy.
The sound of Dad’s car spluttering to a stop at the curb and the smell of corn and string beans told me it was suppertime. I dropped the fifty-eight cents into my pencil box and spread a few open books out on my desk so that any snoopers would think I was really up to my eyeballs in homework.
Dad stabbed his fork into a jumble of string beans. “So, Vivi. How was your day?”
“I’ve run into a problem,” I said. “Sort of a math problem.”
“Remind me after supper. I’ll help you work it out before driving you over to Grandpa’s.”
Mom poured water into our glasses. “Dan,” she said, “have you been getting any new business lately? Anything from Silhouette? How about Paisley? Did they place any orders?”
Dad clinked his fork onto his plate. “Aaaah, I wish, Jenny,” he said. “They haven’t given us any business for months, and that old galoot Henderson says nobody’s getting a raise this year. He says with business the way it is, we’re all lucky to have jobs . . . and we’d better not make waves. Imagine.”
“Oh, darn!” Mom said. “Isn’t there anything you can do about it?”
His voice flew up a whole notch. “Don’t be such a worrywart!” he said. “We have to take it one step at a time, and that means cutting corners.”
“Cut corners! Cut corners!” shouted Mom. “That’s all we ever seem to do!”
Dad pounded his fist on the table. He almost had all the forks and knives jumping right off the plates. “We’re not the only ones, for cryin’ out loud!” he shouted. “And in case you haven’t noticed, everyone has money troubles these days! That’s reality . . . don’t you get it?”
I’m not an absolute dimwit, you know. That’s probably why people are surprised that I don’t do so great in school. Even my teachers don’t know that when it comes to solving everyday problems, I’m no slouch. Not that I can figure out square roots or breeze through long division like some kind of Einstein. No. It’s that I’m pretty good at things that really matter. Like, at carnivals, I can usually come up with a pretty close guess about how many beans there are in a jar. Okay, maybe that’s not the best example. Once, right in the middle of Woolworth’s, a whole bunch of people kept trying to get this baby to stop crying. “Maybe he’s thirsty.” “Maybe he’s wet.” “Try picking him up.” They carried on as if they’d all just graduated from Doctor Spock University. After they all gave up, I figured I’d give it my best shot. A few peek-a-boos—a couple of funny faces—and, within seconds, the little guy turned all cute and giggly. That’s the kind of stuff I mean. I’m pretty good at things like that. So what I’m getting at is that, lots of times, if I really put my mind to it, I can even get my parents to snap out of their crummy moods. Don’t get me wrong. It doesn’t work every time, but just on the odd chance that it might, I’m always ready to give it a try.
“Say, here’s a good one,” I said. “A big moron and a little moron were walking along the edge of a cliff. The big moron fell off. Why didn’t the little one?”
Mom yanked off her apron. She kept firing words at Dad as if she hadn’t even heard me. “That Drapeau and his promises!” she continued. “Little shrimp of a mayor . . . he’s leading us all into the poorhouse!”
Dad’s voice boomed, “Give the man a chance, for heaven’s sake! He’s only been in office a few months, and if I remember correctly, you voted for him.”
“He was a little more-on,” I said. “Get it? He didn’t fall off, because he was a little . . . more . . . on.”
Mom gave me a look. “Please! This is no time for your foolishness!”
It seemed that neither one of them was in the mood to switch to another mood.
Dad shoved his chair back hard enough to chip the paint off the wall. “There’s no point in rehashing our budget right this second,” he roared. “The whole thing can wait till later . . . when we’re alone. So just drop it!”
Well, isn’t that just dandy! Now they’ve got themselves caught up in a math problem all their own, and it looks like mine’s gonna have to wait.
FIX-IT NIGHT AT GRANDPA’S
Grandpa says that girls are usually cheated out of learning important stuff. He says that everybody should learn how to splice electric wires, refinish furniture and solder pipes. So on my Wednesday visits to Grandpa’s, we usually fix things . . . or make things. Grandpa always says, “If y’ have only one hour to do a task, you’d be wise to spend the first forty-five minutes planning and measuring. If y’ do that, then the rest of the job will be as easy as pie.”
We’ve built birdhouses and knick-knack shelves. We wired up a lamp and installed two light switches. I even helped him change a few worn-out washers to stop the taps from dripping. Grandpa promised that he’d even let me help him do some plastering and painting in the spring. “You’re ready for life,” Grandpa says. Whenever we finish a job, he hugs me and says that. “You’re ready for life.” I love when he says that.
Of course, my visits to Grandpa’s are not only work-work-work. We always set aside time for a few games of chess. When I was a little kid, maybe five or six, he taught me the names of all the pieces, how each one moves, and how to plan my strategy. Now I even beat him sometimes.
The worst thing about Grandpa is that his place is one gigantic mess. It’s even worse than our place. He keeps boxes of things everywhere. Broken watches, cameras, radio parts and all kinds of electrical stuff. He has stacks and stacks of newspapers and magazines. He says there’s a few articles in them that he’ll get around to reading one day. (Ha!) Grandpa has two or three vacuum cleaners, all in pieces, in a corner of
