THE CLUBHOUSE
Ingrid was in the clubhouse all by
herself. She’d come to get her socks
and it was so nice and quiet – and cool, now – that she had stayed and was
sitting on an old bench in front of the window that looked over Joshua’s ‘meadow’,
her head resting on her arms on the windowsill. It smelled warm and dusty and she felt tired and content.
The sound of someone climbing up the
outside stairs to this room above the old garage startled her and she raised
her head and then relaxed as Ellen pushed open the door and came in.
"I saw you come up here awhile ago
and wondered what you were doing." Ellen answered Ingrid’s look.
"Took my socks off ’cause it was so
hot in the meeting and I forgot them," Ingrid explained in a languid voice. She hadn’t slept well last night because
some mosquitoes had gotten in her bedroom and the buzzing and biting kept
waking her up.
Ellen sat in the chair Joshua usually sat
in. They’d ‘found’ it in Sam’s basement
when they started the club and so far no adult had complained that it had gone
missing. It had been an awful fuss to
get it up the stairs and into this room. As had most of the ‘finds’. The
stairway was steep!
The girls were silent.
"I don’t really…" they both
started to say at once and then stopped but Ellen, surprised, went on, "I
usually only do that with Lucy – " who, at this instant, bounded up the
stairs and flew into the room.
"Hi!", she said,
breathless. "So did you find out
what Ingrid was doing up here?"
"Making people appear," Ingrid
said. "Now, if Piya shows up we
can have
an all
girls clubhouse."
Lucy plopped down on a big old sofa
cushion.
"I was going to say I don’t really
like the meetings," Ellen said.
"Hey, I was going to say the same
thing!" Ingrid told them.
They stared at each other and Lucy looked
at both of them but she clamped her lips shut. She felt she SHOULD like the meetings because they were a club and a
club had to have meetings.
Suddenly they could hear voices down below
in the meadow, the area beside Joshua’s garage that was too hard to get to with
the lawnmower so it was left to grow naturally. It was one of the gang’s favourite spots.
Ingrid looked out the window then turned
to Lucy and Ellen, put her finger to her lips and beckoned them over. They
crept to beside Ingrid. Joshua and Bill
and Piya were in the meadow. Bill and
Joshua were talking about maybe making a soap box derby car and Piya was listening. The girls in the loft of the garage could
hear what was being said because one of the top panes of glass was
missing. Lucy wanted to mention this
fact to Joshua’s father but the rest of the gang talked her out of it and Piya
hung a towel over the opening if it were raining or too drafty during
meetings. They didn’t want any adults
interfering with their clubhouse. And
since Joshua had ‘borrowed’ a few items from his father for the clubhouse he
didn’t think he wanted his father to come up there.
"Let’s make faces," Lucy
suggested and they all three pushed their faces up against the window glass and
made a horrid expression and then Lucy knocked on the window.
The trio looked up. Piya yelped.
"The meeting was adjourned ages
ago," Joshua called out. "What are you doing in the clubhouse?"
All three girls said something at once so
Joshua shrugged and trooped around the corner of the old garage and up the
stairs. Piya followed. Bill threw himself down on a clump of
dandelions but then he got curious so he went up to the clubhouse as well.
"Well, we don’t have to have
meetings," Joshua was saying when Bill got there but he sounded upset.
"Meetings are important," Piya
was saying because she couldn’t stand to see Joshua out of sorts. "Clubs are supposed to have
meetings," Lucy was saying. "Maybe
it’s just the heat – it was too hot today up here," Ellen, the peacemaker,
was saying. "I didn’t like them in
the spring, either," Ingrid was telling everyone, "And you said you
didn’t like them either," she said to Ellen, her bottom lip stuck out in a
frown. It was chaos.
Sam suddenly fell into the room
because he tripped. He lay full length
on the floor and everyone was startled to silence.
"Are you hurt?" Piya asked.
"Wind knocked out," he managed
to say and it was so quiet for Sam that Lucy went over to him and stared down
into his face. Sam stared back. Bill, who had nearly got knocked over himself
by Sam’s flying into the room, went over and hoisted the silent, staring Sam up
under his armpits and propped him against the old rolled-up rug that was curled
into a seating place.
"I heard you all yelling," Sam
finally spoke and in a nearly normal voice so the gang turned their attention
back to the meeting at hand.
"What don’t you like about
meetings?" Joshua asked Ingrid who
suddenly felt picked upon; after all, Ellen had said she didn’t like them either and Lucy had put on her
stubborn look which Ingrid knew meant she agreed but wouldn’t admit to it. She was about to complain that she was not
the only one who didn’t like the meetings when Sam suddenly shouted, "Too
much like church!"
Everyone looked at him in astonishment.
"Church?" asked Bill,
blankly. Club meetings weren’t anything
like church to him.
"Too serious," Sam explained
loudly. "We never have any
fun."
Joshua looked defensive and thoughtful.
"Maybe we could have a little bit
less business," Ellen said and hoped Joshua wouldn’t take offence. He was a bit of a stickler for what he
called an agenda and making sure the minutes were kept. Piya did her best to record everything that
happened because that is what it meant to "keep the minutes" but she was always having to ask people to
repeat what they said or slow down or explain because she could only write so
fast. And then often at the next
meeting she couldn’t read what she had written the time before when she had to
report the minutes and they often got into an argument about this.
"I see," said Joshua, twiddling
his glasses around and around his fingers.
There was a long silence. "Let’s discuss it at the next
meeting," he finally said. This
was a whole week away so everyone gladly agreed.
"We could have refreshments and
entertainment," Lucy suddenly suggested. She answered six pairs of inquiring eyes. "My Mom has a bridge club and they have things to eat and
once one of the ladies performed a skit for them, it was one she was going to
do on stage for her drama group and she was rehearsing it but they all loved
it."
"But they play cards," Joshua
objected. "That’s not our kind of
club."
"We could play cards", Sam
shouted. He liked to play rummy with
his sister. The gang ignored him and
John was suddenly in their midst. He
seemed to be able to come and go without any fanfare at all.
"I think we should bring to the next
meeting exactly what each of us thinks will improve the meetings," he said
as if he had been there all along.
"What do you mean exactly?"
asked Lucy who liked things exact.
John shrugged. "I don’t know. I
just thought up the suggestion. And I
know what I am going to bring."
The gang waited for John to give them some
hint of his offering but he didn’t give anything away with even the hint of a
motion – he knew just how much his actions could express.
The gang sprawled around in the clubhouse
in a thoughtful quiet.
For the next week they all seemed a little
preoccupied and when the twin’s parents planned an outing for the day of the
meeting Ellen and Lucy made such an outburst that they changed their
plans. "We can’t change the
meeting day," they wailed.
"Women!" their father said.
"Daughters!" their mother said.
On the day of the meeting at just on two
o’clock the gang converged on the clubhouse. John was already there seated on the top step and when the gang came up
the steps he silently pointed to what he had brought, a wooden sign on which he
had painted, OUR CLUBHOUSE, and under this he had neatly printed all their
names. He had hung the sign on the door but everyone insisted it had to come
inside the clubhouse and it was then hung by its rope on a nail over the window
where everyone could see and admire it.
"I don’t think it will ever be just
the clubhouse again," John said quietly. "Now it’s OUR
CLUBHOUSE."
And everyone knew what he meant.
"How come my name is at the very
bottom?" Sam shouted. John was
about to tell him he had listed their names by age but Ellen said, "That’s
because you keep the rest of us from falling off the sign onto the
floor." This made everyone grin,
even Sam, and he added a loud, "Idiot numbskull."
When they had all taken their usual places
Joshua put a plaque on the wooden box in front of his chair. The box served him as a desk. The plaque said, "President At
Large" and had a picture of a smiling lion on it.
Everyone looked at the plaque and then at
Joshua. He was polishing his glasses.
"I thought you would think meetings
were more fun with this here," he explained.
The gang digested this.
"Where did you get it?" Ellen wanted to know.
Joshua paused for a few moments. "Someone gave it to my Dad."
Joshua’s Dad was president of a large
company.
"Oh," said Piya but no one else
said anything.
Then they all noticed that Sam had put a
paper bag over his head with eyes and nose and mouth cut out.
Lucy gave it a playful thump.
"Idiot numbskull," Sam told her.
"How come the mask?" Bill
inquired.
"Because then you don’t know how I am
and I don’t have to worry about how to be and I wish I could wear this in
church."
Everyone hooted and Sam laughed also. But he kept the bag over his head.
Ingrid had been carrying a basket with a
towel over it and now she took off the towel and lifted out a pretty jam jar
with a bunch of wildflowers and grasses and leaves and a swirly twig. She put it on the windowsill under John’s
sign.
"This is so we can be sort of
outdoors when we have our meetings." she said. She had once called a meeting "stuffy" and gone home
halfway through but later told them she’d had a headache and was getting a cold
and apologized. Now Lucy wondered if
maybe Ingrid just felt ‘stuffy’ indoors, headache or not.
All the rest admired the lovely
bouquet. Joshua decided to open the
clubhouse door and leave it open as soon as he could do so without causing
comment.
Ellen and Lucy looked at each other and
smiled secretly and then opened the cardboard box they had brought. Lucy lifted
out a tray carefully covered in plastic wrap and Ellen took out a handful of
stiff cardboard paper on popsicle sticks. "Fans," she said proudly, passing them out. "I made them. For when it gets too hot."
Everyone took one and looked at it and
tried it out. "Ohhhh – so breezy," said Ingrid.
Snap! Sam had waved his so energetically the popsicle stick broke where it was
attached to the fan. Everyone went
silent and everyone, except Piya who kept her head down, stared at the paper
bag mask that was Sam. Joshua could see
into the mask because Sam was closest to him and he could see the tears so he
quickly got up and said, "Whoops, too much electricity. I’ll fix it in a
jiff." He took the fan from Sam
and disappeared out the door, leaving the door open.
Bill was annoyed at Sam – why wasn’t he more careful and as his
mother often asked him, what did he expect to happen if he did that.
They all listened as Joshua skipped down
the stairs and went across the yard and into his house calling,
"Mom."
Sniffly sounds came from Piya’s bowed
head. Sam reached up under his mask and
brushed at his tears.
"Try these, our Mom made them,"
Lucy said, whipping the plastic off the tray of fancy sandwiches. She offered them to Sam first and he took
one with pink and white filling like a checkerboard.
"Yum," he managed to say around
tears and a full mouth.
The rest were trying out the pretty
sandwiches when Joshua came back, the fan all fixed, and gave it to Sam. Then he also took some sandwiches. They were awfully piddly, he thought, but
they did look nice.
"What did you bring, Piya?"
asked Ingrid.
"Oh, I forgot." She was all cheerful again. She reached in the pocket of her skirt and
brought out a small blue book. "Shorthand. I’m learning. So I can
keep the minutes faster."
Everyone stared at her. Joshua stared so hard he forgot to blink.
"We don’t have to have
minutes…" he began.
"But I like to keep the
minutes," Piya explained. "I
just need to write faster. And I’m not
going to try to write all our names all the time – I’ve made up abrif, aberif –
"
"Abbreviations?"
"Yes. Like Js for Joshua and Jn for John and Ig for Ingrid. And I don’t have to write every word. And lines and things mean words. I can do ‘dear’ and ‘the’ already. My aunt told me all about it."
"You have an aunt who’s a secretary
too?" Bill wanted to know.
"No, this is my aunt the doctor. She learned it for when she is writing up
patients’ notes."
Sam gave a huge hiccup and everyone
laughed. "I’m not going to even
try to record that!" said Piya, giggling.
Bill brought out an item from the crumbled
paper bag he was holding. It was a
stick about a foot long with a sort of knob on one end and some natural
markings along the side. It was smooth
and highly polished. "I found this
and I made it all shiny. It’s a talking
stick. My Mom told me all about
them."
"It TALKS?" Sam shouted.
"How?"
"No, it’s not like that. When someone is talking they hold this and
it means no one can interrupt until the person who is speaking is
finished. I thought our meetings would
be better if we didn’t always try to talk at once or argue over whose turn it
is to talk or have to have Joshua bang on his gravel so much."
"Gavel," said Lucy, under her
breath. "Will he ever get it
right."
"Or threaten to pound us," Sam
shouted.
"That’s a great idea," Ellen was
saying.
"Your Mom knows everything about
everything," Ingrid was saying.
Joshua reached out and took the talking
stick from Bill. He held it up in front
of him until everyone noticed and stopped talking.
"I declare the new, revised meeting
of Joshua and his Gang officially opened," he said and tossed the stick
back to Bill who caught it with a "Whoooopdeeedoooo!" as they both
reached for another sandwich.