Beezus and Ramona - Beverly Cleary [6]
For once Ramona didn’t know what to say. She scowled and looked as if she were building up to a tantrum. “You’ve got to read it to me,” she said at last.
“Not unless I feel like it,” said Beezus.
“After all, it’s my book,” she couldn’t resist adding.
“That’s no fair!” Ramona looked as if she were about to howl.
“It is too fair,” said Beezus calmly. “And if you have a tantrum I won’t read to you at all.”
Suddenly, as if she had decided Beezus meant what she said, Ramona stopped scowling. “O.K.,” she said cheerfully.
Beezus watched her carefully for a minute. Yes, she really was being agreeable, thought Beezus with a great feeling of relief. And now that she did not have to read Big Steve unless she wanted to, Beezus felt she would not mind reading it once in a while. “Come on, Ramona,” she said. “Maybe I’ll have time to read to you before Father comes home.”
“O.K.,” said Ramona happily, as she took Beezus’s hand.
Miss Evans smiled at the girls as they started to leave. “Good luck, Beatrice,” she said.
2
Beezus and
Her Imagination
Beezus and Ramona both looked forward to Friday afternoons after school—Beezus because she attended the art class in the recreation center in Glenwood Park, Ramona because she was allowed to go to the park with Beezus and play in the sand pile until the class was over. This Friday while Beezus held Ramona by the hand and waited for the traffic light to change from red to green, she thought how wonderful it would be to have an imagination like Ramona’s.
“Oh, you know Ramona. Her imagination runs away with her,” Mother said, when Ramona made up a story about seeing a fire engine crash into a garbage truck.
“That child has an imagination a mile long,” the Quimbys’ grown-up friends remarked when Ramona sat in the middle of the living-room floor in a plastic wading pool she had dragged up from the basement and pretended she was in a boat in the middle of the lake.
“Did you ever see so much imagination in such a little girl?” the neighbors asked one another when Ramona hopped around the yard pretending she was the Easter bunny.
One spring day Ramona had got lost, because she started out to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The rainbow had appeared to end in the park until she reached the park, but then it looked as if it ended behind the Supermarket. When the police brought Ramona home, Father said, “Sometimes I think Ramona has too much imagination.”
Nobody, reflected Beezus, ever says anything about my imagination. Nobody at all. And she wished, more than anything, that she had imagination. How pleased Miss Robbins, the art teacher, would be with her if she had an imagination like Ramona’s!
Unfortunately, Beezus was not very good at painting—as least not the way Miss Robbins wanted boys and girls to paint. She wanted them to use their imagination and to feel free. Beezus still squirmed with embarrassment when she thought of her first painting, a picture of a dog with bowwow coming out of his mouth in a balloon. Miss Robbins pointed out that only in the funny papers did dogs have bowwow coming out of their mouths in balloons. Bowwow in a balloon was not art. When Miss Robbins did think one of Beezus’s paintings was good enough to put up on the wall, she always tacked it way down at the end, never in the center. Beezus wished she could have a painting in the center of the wall.
“Hurry up, Ramona,” Beezus coaxed. Then she noticed that her sister was dragging a string along behind her. “Oh, Ramona,” she protested, “why did you have to bring Ralph with you?” Ralph was an imaginary green lizard Ramona liked to pretend she was leading by a string.
“I love Ralph,” said Ramona firmly, “and Ralph likes to go to the park.”
Beezus knew it was easier to pretend along with Ramona than to make her stop. Anyway, it was better to have her pretend to lead a lizard than to pretend to be a lizard herself. “Can’t you carry him?” she suggested.
“No,” said Ramona. “He’s slimy.”