keeps on being there till she does whatever she’s supposed to do. Anybody can see from this that Maureen has always been very good and a Great Favorite with Mother and Father. The Big Ones -I am one of the Big Ones-say she will grow out of this, but I don’t know. She is already thirteen. For instance, Maureen always answers letters. The rest of us sometimes get the answers to letters written out, but we practically never get them written and addressed and stamped and mailed. My brother John, who is our Second Child and First Boy, says his Inner Compulsion leaves him the minute he writes “Yours, John” at the end of an answer. Once Father asked him if he thought he could get his letters mailed if he didn’t sign them, but John said that after all, if he didn’t sign the letters he leaves lying around, Mother wouldn’t know whose girls she was checking up on. Father couldn’t answer that one, because there is no denying that Mother is unduly interested in our Romantic Life. But then Mother is Southern. Of course, the rest of us being the Way We Are about answering letters, Maureen had to born the Other Way. Her Inner Compulsion is twice as compelling as John’s and it lasts much longer-in fact till she gets an answer to her letter, which she says is the only sure proof that the person she wrote to, got it. And then it starts all over again. All that would be all right if Maureen would kindly confine herself to answering her own letters, but to show you how she Carries Things to Extremes, she even answers other people’s mail if she thinks they take too long. Last summer vacation, for instance, she answered Mr. Millbrook’s letter to me and said, yes, I would try to do better at math next year, which wasn’t what I would have said at all. I was going to explain to him about planning to be a Prominent Author and hence not needing mathematics. And then, in spite of what I said to her-and I can be Extremely Withering-just because she heard Mother say something to Father about “You’d better do something about your Income Tax” and Father said “What Income?”, Maureen took it upon herself to write to the Collector of Internal Revenue-who is an Unrelenting Enemy of our family, anyway-and say that Father had no Income and please stop bothering him. As I pointed out to her afterward, this certainly could not have added to the respect in which our Father is held by the United States Government. But the worst thing Maureen did along that line was four years ago when she was nine, which shows how young these things develop. Our sister Sally, who is our First Child and First Girl, got married and when she didn’t get around to writing a thank-you note for the last wedding present that dribbled in, Maureen wrote it for her. The lady she wrote it to sent it back to Mother with Caustic Comments, which is how we know. It said: “Dear Mrs. Lavatory” (the lady’s name is La Vetrie), “How could you be so gennerus to a poor young bride like me? I opened your package with fear and tremling. Could it be what I had longed for and yerned for and hoped for and dreemed about. Could it be a pickle fork? It was. It was. How sweet. I thank you. A big kiss from Sally.” Can you imagine? We were a laughing-stock! The whole town laughed at us; even Mother and Father and the Big Ones laughed. Of course I did, too, but only because I have such a good Sense of Humor. This summer a terrible thing happened to Maureen, which is what this story is really about. john says I should call it “Caught in the Meshes of Her Own Efficiency,” but I think that’s too long. Father said John could rest secure in the knowledge that nobody would ever write a story about him called that, but then that was the day that John found the key to the car had been in his pocket all along, and Father was naturally Bitter. Anyhow, the thing that happened was that Maureen wrote a letter to the Pen Pal Department of some dopey kid magazine she is always reading, and it got published. The letter said: “Dear Pals: My name is Maureen Stoddard and I am thirteen years old, nearly. I have blue eyes and my hair is almost blonde. I am 4 Ft. and 11 In. and I weigh 96 Pds. I have a brown horse called Jim and a brown and white dog called Jimmy and a yellow cat called James. My favorite name is Jim. Ha Ha. My brother Ritchie [that’s me] works in the zoo at his school and every summer he brings home a flying squirrel and a python and I take care of them. [Not entirely true.] I also have nine brothers and sisters, six older and three younger. A big kiss from Maureen Stoddard, Age 13.” Her letter was printed, principally, I imagine, because of my flying squirrel and python. Maureen showed us the letter in the magazine on the twenty-second of June. I remember distinctly because it was Bob’s nineteenth birthday -Bob is our Fourth Child and Second Boy-and Maureen was broke. So instead of a birthday present she gave him a promise to make all his appointments, like dentists and dates, all summer long, and to Remind Him. John said that wasn’t a promise, that was a threat, and Bob said a better birthday present would be to promise not to Remind Him, and Mother and Father said it was a Fine Idea. So we had quite a discussion all during lunch, and it only ended when Maureen, who is very illogical, said maybe we all thought we were very smart, but she had the first Published Works of the family because she had a letter in Pen Pals. She showed it to us then, in a very red and flustered way, so we Remembered Our Manners, which we often do, and told her it was very good. John even said it was a very Telling Piece of writing, and would probably Call Forth a response. Little did we know. That was only on Tuesday. On Thursday Maureen got seven letters from Pen Pals. On Friday she got eighteen. Between Saturday and the following Tuesday she got 47 more. By the first of July, Maureen had had 115 answers to her letter, and they were still coming in. I guess if you haven’t got the point of this by now you never will, but just in case you haven’t the point is this. Maureen has to answer letters. Her Inner Compulsion makes her. So there she was, stuck. Enmeshed, as John and I would say. The first day she worked all morning and took off in the afternoon to go swimming. The second day-she’d had twenty letters by then-she worked all morning and went upstairs again right after lunch and wrote till five. By the third day she had made the Appalling Discovery that she couldn’t keep up with her correspondence unless, besides all that, she worked till nine o’clock at night, which is bedtime in our family for Growing Children. For the next week we hardly saw Maureen at all. She got Ella, who is our maid, to give her her meals in her room, and whenever you looked in, there she was, on her stomach in the middle of the floor, writing and writing, with a small pile of answered letters by her left elbow and an enormous pile of unanswered letters by her right elbow. John called them the Mountain and the Molehill. She didn’t go swimming once in a whole week. She didn’t ride her pony. Her eyes got red, her hair got mussy and her face which is usually pretty lobstery in the summer got pale. She even almost got thin. In fact, she looked like a word that when you use it, it does not show that you are Bold and Daring but only you have an Inadequate Vocabulary. And four times that week, at bedtime, when I absent-mindedly ran my thumb across her toothbrush-which I sometimes do for the Younger Ones, to Protect Them
Against Themselves-her toothbrush
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