What NOW, Mollie?

By Virginia V. Kidd

This funny book features fifth grader Mollie, who lives on the Gulf Coast of Texas in 1955. Mollie loves words and has a Good Word Collection. She wants to win her school's Good Citizen Award to give the trophy to her beloved Great-Aunt Nyla on her 80th birthday. The catch is that Mollie has to have an adult sign off on each Good Citizen deed, and the adults involved don't always see her "logical" ideas as all that good. Mollie's ideas are certainly creative: If your mother tells you your brother got up on the wrong side of the bed, isn't it logical to push him off the other side? When he wants the dog to come to him, why not open a can of dog food and shove the meat into his pockets? If you and your classmates are learning about South America, why not draw it on the playground and have students lie down on the dirt in a shape like a country? When your mother asks you to wrap your brother's birthday gift so he won't guess what it is, what's wrong with putting it inside a loaf of bread?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350907285

Book preview

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© 2023 Virginia V. Kidd. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN 979-8-35090-727-8 eBook 979-8-35090-728-5

For my dear friends in

the Coffee and Ink writers group

who insisted Mollie’s stories needed to be read

Contents

Chapter 1

Mollie’s Science Observation

Chapter 2

Who Wants to Be Bolivia?

Chapter 3

Building Your Own Hurricane

Chapter 4

Shere Khan Slays a House Shoe

Chapter 5

Is Advice an Order?

Chapter 6

Has Anybody Seen My Gal?

Chapter 7

Paring a Pair of Pears

Chapter 8

The Wrong Side of the Bed

Chapter 9

The Bologna Sky

Chapter 10

Jed Travis Rows to China

Chapter 11

A Chat with Miss Kilgore

Chapter 12

Red Hots and Baby Shirts

Chapter 13

Mr. Fetters’s Suggestion

Chapter 14

Improvising with Red Riding Hood

Chapter 15

Perking Up the Shindig

Chapter 16

Great-Aunt Nyla’s Birthday

Mollie’s Good Word Collection

Chapter 1

Mollie’s Science Observation

Right in the middle of class Friday while my fifth grade teacher, Miss Kilgore, explained our next assignment I got a great idea for what to give my Great-Aunt Nyla for her birthday. She’ll be eighty years old this fall. I know because she tells us every time she comes over from Houston to Bayview to visit. I was born in 1875, she’ll say, and now it’s 1955. Know how old that will make me? Well, of course I do because it’s about the millionth time she’s said that. I really love her and I want to give her something special, but I didn’t know what until that idea slid into my brain.

The idea came during science. The windows were open letting the hot air in. Miss Kilgore stood up by the blackboard. She looked very pretty in her maroon dress with the gold buttons down the front. She gave us that smile teachers use when they’re about to assign something grim and said, When scientists wonder about nature, do you know what they do?

I did know. They find the answer and tell everybody, and then we have to learn their names for tests. I didn’t get to tell her though because she answered herself.

They observe their subject very carefully and make notes. What they report helps us all to learn about our natural world. We all wonder about things we see in nature, don’t we? Do you wonder how shadows change as the sun gets higher? Or what makes driftwood smooth? Who can share something that you wonder about?

My hand zoomed up like an airplane. I wondered something just last night.

Miss Kilgore took a deep breath. She seems to do that whenever she calls on me. Isn’t that strange? Mollie.

I wonder who drools the most, our dog, Big Red, or my baby brother, Alton.

We sit in rows in our class. Quentin, in the fourth row, raised his hand. When she called on him, he said to me, How can you observe that? I don’t think you can.

Quentin can be very annoying. He has a big head that sticks up on a skinny neck like an ostrich. I shifted around so I could see him better and said, I can put them both on a sheet on the floor with Alton set to crawl and Big Red right beside him. Their drool will drip down, and after a while I can see which side of the sheet is wetter.

Quentin shook his head. Their mouths are different sizes. A baby with a small mouth might really drool more but it wouldn’t show.

He thinks he’s so smart. He won last spring’s Good Citizen Award and has been a big know-it-all ever since. Great-Aunt Nyla told me she won a citizenship award once, and I’m sure she didn’t get all bossy like Quentin.

I remembered how sad she looked when she told me that her trophy got lost when they moved, and that’s when the idea hit me. Bam! Just like that, out of the blue! I would win this fall’s Good Citizen Award and give the trophy to Great-Aunt Nyla for her birthday to replace her lost one. Miss Kilgore had given us a paper with instructions on how to win the award. I’d have to dig it out and read it again.

In the meantime, from the row next to me C.J. chimed in without even being called on, which he does all the time. We got a baby at our house. Babies spit up. That’s not drool, but the sheet would still be wet. He grinned and rubbed his burr haircut. He does that all the time, too.

Spit-up looks different from drool, C.J., Lucia said in her soft voice. Mollie can tell the difference. Her dark hair fell in curls around her face the way I wish my hair would do, but mine’s kind of brown and doesn’t curl.

Hiram, over by the windows, waved his hand and started talking. And if you tried that, Mollie, your dog might run out the door and chase an ice cream truck and get lost, and you’d have to go find him, only he might see a moving van with the door open and jump inside it and climb on a big sofa in there and go to sleep and ride all the way to Washington D. C. and go live in the White House, and you wouldn’t even get a cherry Popsicle. Hiram talks that way, sort of like his mind is a grasshopper jumping around all over the place.

Mollie, Miss Kilgore said, for this project, we won’t compare two things. We’ll just study one thing very carefully. She has curly brown hair, and every so often a curl in front pops out of the comb that holds it back and drops onto her forehead. Her naughty curl fell out right then and she shook her head to try to make it fly back. Boy, if she graded her curls, that one would get a bad mark. Each of you will be a scientist. Ask a question about something you see in the natural world. Observe it very carefully and take notes. Describe what you see. Write your report as a way to help others learn about what you see.

She handed out a page of directions and gave some more examples—something about oil in water and flags showing wind direction and some other stuff I didn’t hear because I already had a new question that would be easy to observe: How long does it take a baby to sunburn? I would observe Alton. He’s very pale and the difference will be easy to see. When we’re playing outside, Mama is always telling us to get back in the house so we won’t get sunburned. After my study we would know how long we could stay out.

The next day, Saturday, was sunny and hot, the way it always is here on the Texas Gulf Coast at the beginning of September. It was a special day for us because Great-Aunt Nyla was coming for dinner. Uncle Brock and Aunt Verna would drive over to Houston, which takes an hour or so, pick her up, come back to Bayview, and all three would join us for dinner. Daddy was mowing the lawn in the back yard making the air smell really good, and Mama was in the kitchen baking a cake making the kitchen smell really good. She wore her pretty blue dress and even had on her gold earrings Daddy gave her for Christmas. She had a frilly apron around her waist so she looked like Dick and Jane’s mother in the first grade reading books.

I wanted to do my observation before the company came. I told Mama I’d watch Alton, and she seemed very pleased. Alton lay in his crib watching stars in his mobile turn around a moon while music played When You Wish upon a Star. I picked him up, and he wrapped his chubby arms around my neck. I got a big whiff of milk and baby powder. I gave him a tight hug. He drooled on my neck, but I didn’t care.

Mama and Daddy decided to have this baby last year for no good reason that I can see, although I really love him. I’m practically eleven, and my dork of a brother Jed Travis is eight. Any logical parent who wanted another baby would have had it a long time ago, and that baby would be a girl! Instead they had another boy. They named him Alton Whitney Walker after my daddy, who is Whitney, and his daddy, Alton. They did that because Jed Travis is named for Mama’s family, but isn’t it terrible? I said, Mama, you mustn’t name him that. His initials will be AWW. People will tease him and say, ‘Aww, poor boy.’ Why don’t you name him Clark Kent, after Superman? But no, she wouldn’t.

Well, everybody can’t have a good name like Mollie Olivia Walker where your initials are the same even if you turn them upside down.

I took Alton outside and put him on a towel right in the middle of the concrete driveway where it was hottest and gave him his teddy bear and a rattle. All he had on was his diaper so his skin would be easy to see. He was white as a goose, and the top of his head looked just like his skin except for a few gold hairs that lay there like little drips of buttermilk. He sat like he always does with his knees pulled up and his hands in his mouth, giggling and drooling and teetering back and forth like a giant hard-boiled egg. I settled on the porch to observe him.

This was exactly what Miss Kilgore told us to do, and there was no reason at all for Mama to ruin my homework by running out, grabbing up Alton, and screeching, What on earth is the matter with you, Mollie Walker? She stomped over to the porch. How long were you planning to leave this poor baby sitting out there in the blazing sun?

Just till he burned, I said.

She carried him inside, got her fingers wet, and dribbled cold water on his head. Alton smacked the water rolling down his cheeks and made gurgling noises like the faucet when you first turn it on.

Mama, he’s not even pink yet, I squealed. You’re ruining my science observation!

Alton grinned at me and blew a spit bubble. She took him into the bedroom and made me wash all the mixing