The World According to Humphrey (11 page)

I could tell she was trying hard to sound cheery.

“His name is Humphrey.”

Mr. Brisbane sneered. “This is unacceptable! For the little pay you get, that school can’t force you to spend your weekend baby-sitting a rat!”

I bit my tongue to keep from saying something unsqueakably bad.

“They’re not forcing me,” argued Mrs. Brisbane. “It’s just that no one else could do it. Let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill.”

Pardon me, but I resented being called a molehill almost as much as being called a rat.

Mrs. Brisbane quickly changed the subject. “I thought you were going to get dressed today.”

“Why should I? I’m not going to see anybody,” Bert Brisbane growled. “Except you and the rat.”

Mrs. Brisbane got up and walked out of the room without saying another word.

Boy, nobody in Room 26 could get away with talking to Mrs. Brisbane like that. I wished I could send her husband to Principal Morales’s office right now.

Everything was real quiet around the house for a while. Mrs. Brisbane changed her clothes (to jeans!) and moved my cage onto a card table in the corner of the living room. Then she sat down and read the
Guide to the Care and Feeding of Hamsters
and the chart my classmates kept on me.

“Looks like your friends have been taking good care of you,” she said.

“VERY-VERY-VERY GOOD,” I squeaked.

She fed me and gave me clean water and then she and Mr. Brisbane ate dinner in some other room while they watched TV. They went to bed early.

I’ll bet they didn’t say two words to each other. Even Ms. Mac talked more at home than they did, and she lived alone.

The next morning, Mrs. Brisbane was up very early and soon the house smelled yum-yummy. I thought maybe I would like this Thanksgiving thing after all. At least the good-smelling and eating part.

What I didn’t like about Thanksgiving was Mr. Brisbane. While Mrs. Brisbane was clattering pots and clinking pans and making things smell good, he sat in his wheelchair in the living room and frowned. No, I know a better vocabulary word: scowled.

After a while, he called into the kitchen. “Sue, why don’t you stop all the cooking and just sit down for a minute?”

Mrs. Brisbane popped her head out the door and said it wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without turkey and all the trimmings. Then Mr. Brisbane said he didn’t have anything to be thankful for. Mrs. Brisbane went back in the kitchen and banged around some pots and pans again.

That sour expression on the old man’s face was starting to get to me, so I decided to take a little spin on my wheel. I really got that thing going at high speed. I was going so fast, I couldn’t even see whether Mr. Brisbane was smiling or frowning.

Finally, Mrs. Brisbane came into the room to sit down.

“Would you look at that, Sue?” her husband asked.

“He does that all the time,” she said.

“Just spinning his wheels like me. Stuck in a cage and going nowhere.” Mr. Brisbane’s voice was so grim, I stopped spinning.

Whew. I was a little dizzy.

“You’re wrong, Bert,” said Mrs. Brisbane. “Humphrey’s not stuck; he goes everywhere. Every weekend, he goes to another house. He eats different foods. He gets out of the cage and runs through mazes. He runs and jumps and climbs. You’re the one spinning your wheels and going nowhere. You’re stuck in a cage, but it’s a cage you made!”

Well. You could have knocked me over with a feather when I heard Mrs. Brisbane talk that way.

Mr. Brisbane was surprised, too.

“Do you think I wanted that car to hit me? Do you think that was my choice?” he asked.

“Of course not, Bert. I’m so grateful you lived through it. That’s the point. You’re alive, but you sure don’t act like it.”

With that, Mrs. Brisbane got up and went back into the kitchen. Meanwhile, Mr. Brisbane scowled and frowned and glared . . . at me!

Finally, Mrs. Brisbane put the food on the dining-room table. I watched them eating their dinner from my vantage point on the table in the living room. They ate, but they didn’t say much.

“The food is delicious,” Mr. Brisbane finally said.

That’s the nicest thing I’d heard him say so far.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Brisbane replied.

There was silence for a while. Then Mr. Brisbane said, “Just think, last year after Thanksgiving dinner, Jason and I threw the football around the backyard. Now I’m stuck here and Jason is in Tokyo.”

“Let’s call him, Bert,” his wife suggested.

“It’s too early there,” he said. “We’ll have to call later.”

Football. Jason. Tokyo. You can learn a lot if you stop spinning and start listening.

I listened late that night when they called Jason, who turned out to be their grown-up son who was working in Tokyo, which is FAR-FAR-FAR away, even farther than Brazil, according to the maps in Room 26.

Boy, there were more Mrs. Brisbanes than I’d ever dreamed. One was mean to me. One was nice to students. One was a wife. Another one was a mother. One was a cook. One wore dark pantsuits. The other wore jeans.

But which one was the
real
Mrs. Brisbane?

That night, as they headed out of the living room and toward the bedroom, I heard Mrs. Brisbane, the wife, say, “I know you think I was being hard on you, Bert. But it really is time for you to think about what you’re going to do with the rest of your life.”

Mr. Brisbane didn’t answer.

A
pparently, the day after Thanksgiving, humans do two things: eat leftovers from the day before and go shopping.

Mr. Brisbane didn’t go shopping, of course. But Mrs. Brisbane left early in the morning, after telling Mr. Brisbane that there were plenty of leftovers for him in the refrigerator.

So there I was: stuck with old sourpuss. And all he did was sit in his wheelchair, looking unhappy.

I’d much rather have been hanging out with Principal Morales or chatting with Sayeh’s family. I could have been tricking Miranda’s dog, playing cards with A.J.’s family or watching Aldo balance a broom on his finger. But no, I was watching a sad and grouchy old man act sad and grouchy.

I could have just settled in for my nap, but I remembered what Mrs. Brisbane had said. This man had to get out of his cage. “Out of your cage!” I squeaked out loud without realizing it.

“Quiet, you little rat,” Mr. Brisbane growled at me.

Then he wheeled over to the front window and stared out.

Okay. If he wasn’t going to get out of his cage, then I’d get out of mine. Because I had a New Plan.

Mr. Brisbane didn’t notice me open the lock-that-doesn’t-lock. He didn’t see me scamper out of the cage, across the table and onto the couch. He wasn’t aware that I leaped down to the floor. He didn’t even think about me until I stood in the middle of the living room and said, “CATCH ME IF YOU CAN!”

I know he only heard me squeaking, but I sure got his attention. He was as surprised as could be to see me there.

“How did you get out? And how am I ever going to get you back in?” He rolled toward me. “Come on, whatever-your-name-is. Let’s get back in the cage.”

I let him get just close enough to reach me. He bent forward, cupping his hands. But just as he reached out to grab me, I dashed over to the opposite side of the room.

“You little rat,” he said. “You can’t outsmart me.”

He rolled over to the closet and took a baseball cap off a hook. Again, he approached and I let him get almost within arm’s reach. This time, he raised the baseball cap and said, “Okay, fella. Let’s play ball.”

“We’ll see about that,” I squeaked as I bustled off to the living room.

We quickly established the rules of the contest. 1) I would stay out in the open, in places he could reach in his wheelchair. 2) He would use his cap to capture me.

If he could.

Once he reached the dining room, I rushed into the den.

“Oh. Think you’re clever. We’ll see who’s clever,” he challenged.

From the den, I scuttled over to the hallway. By now, Mr. Brisbane’s cheeks were pink and he was almost smiling.

“You’re smart, but you won’t win this one!”

This time, I let him get that cap within a whisker of capturing me, just to keep the game interesting. Then I scurried back to the living room. But before he followed me, Mr. Brisbane slammed the bathroom, bedroom and guest-room doors. Aha! He was limiting my range of possibilities. Pretty cunning.

In the living room, I decided to make a bold move. I hid under the couch. Then I let Mr. Brisbane stew for five minutes.

“Come here, Humphrey. You’ll have to come out sooner or later,” he called. And I thought he didn’t know my name.

He shook the curtains and pushed the chairs to see if he could rouse me.

Too bad he didn’t think of using sunflower seeds like Mr. Morales did. Yum!

I finally got kind of bored, so I made a dash for the dining room. Mr. Brisbane followed and this time I let him scoop me up in the cap.

“I win!” he shouted triumphantly. He was beaming with pride as he stared down at me. “But you were a worthy opponent.”

He put me back in my cage and I scrambled into my sleeping house. I have to admit, the game had made me a little drowsy.

I don’t think it was very long before Mrs. Brisbane returned, carrying several shopping bags full of packages.

“What happened, Bert?” she asked when she saw her husband.

“Nothing,” he said.

“But your face is all rosy. You look different. And you’re wearing a baseball cap,” she said.

“Sit down, Sue,” he answered. “I’ll tell you all about it.”

He told her every detail of our match, chuckling and swinging his cap back and forth.

“I guess there are some things I can still do,” he said. “Now, how about a game of gin rummy?”

Mrs. Brisbane was almost speechless. “Okay,” she said, starting to get up.

Mr. Brisbane waved her away with his cap. “I’ll get the cards. You just sit.”

As he wheeled into the den, Mrs. Brisbane turned to me and quietly said, “Thank you, Humphrey.”

Mr. Brisbane didn’t frown the rest of the day and evening, except when Mrs. Brisbane beat him at cards.

The next morning, which was Saturday, she couldn’t even find her husband.

“Where could he be?” she asked me. “He hasn’t left the house in months!”

A minute later, he came into the house from the garage, his lap full of boards and bricks and things.

“I’ve got an idea for our friend Humphrey,” he said.

Mr. and Mrs. Brisbane spent most of the rest of the day building an obstacle course on the coffee table in the den. They lined up boards along the side (so I couldn’t stray too far) and then they set up things for me to climb over and climb under, like bricks with holes to hide in and big cardboard tubes, and Mr. Brisbane constructed a series of ramps for me to climb. Oh, we had a wonderful day. Mr. Brisbane got out a stopwatch to time me on my runs and they made bets on how long it would take me to get from start to finish. Mrs. Brisbane even added a few treats to the maze: bits of apple and biscuit. I had FUN-FUN-FUN. The Brisbanes did, too. I could tell.

On Sunday afternoon, the Brisbanes invited their neighbors over to watch me run my maze. Mr. and Mrs. Robinson brought their five-year-old twins along.

“Glad to see you looking so chipper,” Mr. Robinson told Mr. Brisbane.

“I think he’s finally feeling better,” Mrs. Brisbane whispered to Mrs. Robinson.

Mr. Brisbane looked a little vinegary again on Monday morning, though. “Why can’t we keep him here, Sue?” he asked.

“The children would never forgive me,” she told him. “He’s really their hamster. But . . .” She grinned. “There’s a two-week Christmas vacation coming up soon. I think Humphrey better spend it here.”

Could I believe my cute, furry ears? She liked me so much, she actually wanted me to come back! This was a whole new Mrs. Brisbane. One who liked me.

By the time Mrs. Brisbane and I returned to Room 26, I was pretty tired. But it was a good tired and I knew I could rest up from my weekend during recess.

I
n December, things in Room 26 really began to change. For one thing, it got cold outside and a little chilly by my window. In the early morning, frost pictures would appear on the glass. One picture looked like a big snowflake. Another looked like a lion. Scary.

Still, it was nice and cozy in my sleeping house.

More snowflakes appeared. Not real ones, but cutout paper snowflakes, bordering all the chalkboards. And there were snowmen made of fluffy cotton and pictures of candles and packages and sleighs.

The holidays were almost here: Christmas and Chanukah and Kwanzaa! There were songs to be sung and presents to be wrapped and a big two-week vacation to come!

The weekend after Thanksgiving break, I went home with Pay-Attention-Art. He paid a lot of attention to me.

But sometimes—not every night—during the week, Mrs. Brisbane would take me home to see Mr. Brisbane and he’d put up his obstacle course and we’d laugh and squeak and have a wonderful time.

The next weekend I stayed at Gail Morgenstern’s house. Friday night was really nice because she convinced her mom to let me watch while she lit the menorah for the family. And the food was yummy.