Ann Martin: Claudia And The Sad Goodbye

"Perfect," agreed Mary Anne. "Plus, your basement is finished. It's carpeted and heated. Ours is just a dark, old, cold basement with a cement floor that leaks when it rains." Mary Anne paused. "What should we do with the kids at their first lesson?"

"Experiment with paper, paint, and water, I think," I replied. "That's something anyone can do. You know, we'll just let Gabbie mess around. The older kids might want to make watercolor scenes on damp paper. Or do other things. I think the class should be fun and relaxed. We shouldn't tell the kids

every little thing to do. We'll let them be creative." Mary Anne nodded. "Okay," she replied.

Our art class was to be held from eleven o'clock to twelve-thirty each Saturday. I was sure, on that first day, that Mary Anne would get nervous and that she would arrive long before anyone else, especially since she lives right across the street.

But Corrie rang our bell first. It was only 10:45. By the time I opened our front door, Mrs. Addison's car was halfway down the driveway.

"You must be Corrie," I said to the little girl standing on our front steps.

She nodded shyly. Corrie was very pretty, with brownish-blonde hair cut straight across her forehead in bangs, and straight around her shoulders below. Her eyes were framed by long, dark lashes. She was small for her age and had no color at all in her cheeks.

She didn't smile, either. Just nodded and stepped inside when I held the door open for her. "Sorry I'm early," she said in a voice so soft I could barely hear it.

"Hey, no problem," I told her. "Listen, I'm Claudia, and I'm going to be one of your teachers. Your other teacher will be Mary Anne. She'll be here soon."

I took Corrie down to the basement. As it turned out, it was a good thing her mother had dropped her off early. By the time Mary Anne and the other kids arrived, Corrie and I had had a chance to talk, she'd chosen a place for herself at the table, and she knew what the day's art project was. She seemed to need to be sure of things in order to feel comfortable.

And so the lesson began. Mary Anne was afraid it would be a mess, but it wasn't. It was just plain fun.

Gabbie Perkins spent most of the morning experimenting with mixing paints in paper cups. She never made a picture. "Look! Look, Claudee Kishi!" she kept exclaiming. "I just made pink!" Or, "I just made … made, um.. a mess." The mess was a greenish-brown color.

Myriah Perkins worked seriously on a picture of Laura, her baby sister, and Matt worked equally seriously at making inkblots. I showed him how to drop paint on one side of a piece of paper, fold it in half, and wind up with symmetrical designs.

"Butterflies," Matt signed to me. (He

doesn't speak. He signs words with his hands.)

Carolyn and Marilyn spent a lot of the lesson trying to fool Jamie Newton. They kept asking him to guess which one of them was which. They weren't dressed alike, and they have different haircuts, but they still look similar; and anyway, Jamie couldn't keep their rhyming names straight.

"You're … you're Marilyn," he'd say as Carolyn asked, for the fourteenth time, "Who am I?" Finally he began calling both of them Very Lynn, which they didn't like.

The twins painted identical pictures of just what you'd expect — a house with four windows, a door, a chimney, a curlicue of smoke rising from the chimney, a strip of blue sky across the top of the paper," and a strip of green grass across the bottom of the paper.

Jamie, who is four, used his paints to give a lesson on colors and shapes to Gabbie, who already knows her colors and shapes. She tried to be patient, though.

"You get a J-plus," Jamie told her when, just to make him keep quiet, Gabbie made a red circle for him.

Corrie laughed for the first time since she'd arrived.

All morning I'd been keeping my eye on Corrie's work. She hadn't spoken to the other children, and had worked silently and thoughtfully. She was creating an imaginary landscape and I knew that her work was good — awfully good — for a nine-year-old. So I told her that.

"You know what?" she confided, almost in a whisper. "I like art. I do. I never told Mommy, but I like it. And I don't like ballet or piano lessons or basketball." Awhile later, she asked me (always waiting for me to come peer over her shoulder, never calling to me), "Do you know where my mommy is right now? Do you know what she's doing?"

I shook my head.

"My daddy? Or Sean?"

"Nope. What are they doing?"

"I don't know. Well, Sean is at his tuba lesson, but I don't know about Mommy and Daddy... I wonder why I'm taking art lessons now, too… But I like my painting… When will Mommy be here? I want her to come back."

It was hard to keep up with Corrie. I looked at my watch. "Class is over in five minutes," I announced.

Corrie smiled.

We cleaned up the table.

Mary Anne walked Jamie and the Perkins girls home. Mr. Arnold arrived for the twins, and Haley Braddock, Matt's older sister, walked over to pick him up. Matt signed "butterfly" to me again with a big grin and waved his paper as he trotted off with Haley.

Corrie and I were left waiting on my front steps. We waited and waited. Corrie looked abandoned, like an orphan.

Mrs. Addison finally arrived half an hour late.

Corrie was the only one who took home a dry painting.

Chapter 5.

I don't know ifwhat Mary Anne wrote is corny — I'm not good at English-class stuff like that — but it sure was true. Every kid who had been at the lesson the week before was back. And when Mary Anne and I told them about the puppets and how to make them, you should have heard the excitement:

"I'm going to make our Cabbage Patch doll," announced Gabbie.

"But why? We already have one," Myriah pointed out. "Caroline Eunice."

"Well, we should have two." Gabbie paused and then said graciously, "You can have the doll for keeps and I'll take the puppet." (The doll is Myriah's anyway.)

"Okay," agreed her sister. "And I'm going to make a rabbit."

"I'm going to make a witch!" said Marilyn Arnold gleefully.

"A space monster … grrr!" growled Jamie.

I had a signing session with Matt to make sure he understood what we were doing, and finally he grinned and signed that he was going to make a baseball player.

The ideas flew — except from Corrie, who merely looked thoughtful.

"Corrie?" I said after awhile. "Do you know what you'd like to make?"

"Nancy Drew," she whispered.

"Really?Nancy Drew?"Icouldn't help exclaiming. "You like Nancy Drew?"

"Yes!" said Corrie, in the most enthusiastic voice I'd ever heard her use. "You like her, too?"

"Sure," I said. "Nancy Drews are my favorite books."

Corrie beamed. And it was then that both Mary Anne and I realized that some sort of bond was growing between Corrie and me. A bond like the one my friend Stacey used to have with Charlotte Johanssen, a kid our club sits for a lot.

So, with the kids' ideas flowing, Mary Anne

helped me set out bowls of water, strips of newspaper we'd cut up the evening before, a jar of flour, and a big tin for dipping the strips into the papier-mâché once it was made.

Then we handed each child a balloon.

"Baby balloons," Gabbie noted.

"She means they're not blown up," Myriah interpreted for us.