Lord and Lady Bunny--Almost Royalty!

THE POP-TARTS ARRIVE
It was summer on Hornby Island.
This was good and bad.
The good part was that the island was warm and lovely. Fragrant with pine and flower blossoms, the seabeds full of sand dollars, the meadows full of deer. Madeline noticed a new fawn who grazed by her bedroom window every morning. She would awaken to its munching and peek out the screen, careful not to startle it. She could hear the sweet chirping of all the birds at sunrise and the gentle croaking of the tree frogs lulling her to sleep at sunset.
The bad part was that the island population tripled as tourists flocked to camp on Hornby’s one small overcrowded campground. All the roads and paths and byways were littered with people in Bermuda shorts dropping candy wrappers. It was good for business at the café where Madeline waitressed, but other than that, she had to admit, it was pretty awful.
Madeline’s parents, Flo and Mildred, were particularly annoyed by the tourists. Flo’s and Mildred’s real names were Harry and Denise, but they asked to be called Flo and Mildred by everyone, including Madeline. They were ex-hippies who had migrated to Canada from California many years before Madeline was born. On Hornby they had their dream existence, living off the land with a little help from Mildred’s sand-dollar art, the occasional marimba gig and Madeline’s waitressing. The summer tourists brought Mildred more business as well, but, said Flo, at what cost?
“Why don’t they all go somewhere else?” asked Flo as he and Mildred and Madeline sat down to a dinner of wild salad greens, tofu and mung bean bread.
“Why don’t we?” asked Mildred.
Flo looked at Mildred. His mouth fell open. “Hey, why not?” he said finally. “Sometimes, Denise, I think you’re a genius.”
“Call me Mildred,” said Mildred.
“But where can we go?” asked Flo. “I’ve got, like, six dollars. You?”
Mildred got out her change purse. “Twenty-seven cents.”
“How much have you got, Madeline?” asked Flo.
“Two hundred and thirteen dollars. But it’s in a bank.”
“A bank?” said Flo, startled. “Bertolt Brecht said--”
“Yes, I know. ‘What is the crime of robbing a bank compared with the crime of founding one.’ But I’m saving for college,” said Madeline imperturbably.
“Wow. That’s, like, so, you know . . .”
“Foresighted?” said Madeline.
“More like weird. You want more school?”
Yes, thought Madeline. And a college education fund like her best friend, Katherine.
Shortly after Katherine had become Madeline’s best friend, which was shortly after they first played together, they had told each other everything about their lives and marveled at the differences, including the fact that Katherine had a college education fund and Madeline did not.
Before meeting Katherine, Madeline had never even heard of a college education fund. But ever since she had, Madeline walked around with a haunted look. She desperately wanted to go to college. Harvard would be her first choice. Madeline loved school. She loved everything about it, from its first-day-in-the-fall freshness to its end-of-the-year festivities. She loved books. She loved studying. She wanted a way to stay in school all her life. Maybe as a college professor. It amazed her that it had never occurred to her that college wasn’t free like public school. And you couldn’t expect the money to just show up the year you enrolled. Of course, people saved for it for years ahead of time. And naturally, Flo and Mildred, who were very in-the-now believers, hadn’t put aside money for her the way Katherine’s parents had. And Flo and Mildred wouldn’t ever take her to a bank to help her set up a fund. Madeline started to have nightmares. In all her nightmares she was fifty years old, making sand-dollar art and watching her brain rot.
“What is the matter?” Flo and Mildred would say when she woke up screaming.
“I am watching my brain rot,” she would say.
“Cool,” Flo would reply.
“What is the matter?” Flo and Mildred would ask when they came upon her sitting on the porch staring fearfully into a future she wanted but couldn’t afford and couldn’t figure out a way to afford.
“I am penniless, and the brain? Still rotting,” she would reply.
“Cool,” Flo would say.
But when Katherine’s mother found Madeline sitting with Katherine on the kitchen floor with a haunted expression and asked her what was wrong, and Madeline held up her two hundred dollars, saying she needed a bank account and why, Katherine’s mother trotted her right down to the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and helped her open a savings account. Katherine’s mother had Madeline’s undying gratitude, but Madeline still worried. She didn’t think she could ever fill up this account with enough money for college. She made a deposit each week anyway and tried not to think about it. But this worried her too because she suspected that just not thinking about things was how Flo and Mildred had ended up on Hornby. And now they wanted to spend money they didn’t have on a vacation.
Besides, she thought, she wasn’t feeling particularly restless. She was still recovering from her recent adventure. At the end of her school term she had come home one day to find that her parents had been kidnapped by foxes who wanted to find out where Madeline’s uncle Runyon, a government decoder, lived. Madeline had traveled to his secret location to enlist his aid, but shortly after her arrival he had fallen into a coma. She was in the depths of despair when Mr. and Mrs. Bunny had stumbled upon her. They had had twelve children of their own and were swift to come to her aid. Together they had tracked down Madeline’s parents. Mrs. Bunny had even knit Madeline a pair of white shoes so that she could participate in the grade five graduation, where none other than Prince Charles gave out the awards. And Mr. and Mrs. Bunny had come to the graduation with her! She missed them already and had promised to visit them again this summer. She had no desire to go any farther afield than that.
“Where would you want to go if we did have enough money to leave the island?” asked Madeline, returning to the subject at hand.
“Anywhere. Egypt. That would be cool. See some hieroglyphics. You remember River Magoo?” asked Flo, turning to Mildred. “From the Haight? He went to Egypt and saw hieroglyphics and they were, like, moving, man. He was never the same.”
“I didn’t know River was so easily moved,” said Mildred, who had always thought River was a bit of a dolt.
“No, they were, like, moving , dancing around the walls. River said they could, like, really shake it.”
“Hieroglyphics are ancient writing on a wall,” said Madeline. “They don’t dance.”
“Maybe not for you or me, but River tended to be in a hyper-spiritual state,” said Flo. “And travel opens you up. Let’s go to Egypt. Let’s see some of those dancing hieroglyphics.”
“On six dollars and twenty-seven cents?” asked Mildred.
“Madeline’s got two hundred dollars . . . ,” said Flo tentatively.
“Not on your life,” said Madeline crisply. “Besides, even that wouldn’t be enough.”
“Where can we go for six dollars and twenty-seven cents?” asked Mildred.
“McDonald’s,” said Flo glumly. He looked crestfallen.
Madeline had some sympathy. If she hadn’t been hoping to visit the Bunnys and hadn’t been so tired from her last adventure, she might have liked a vacation too. The only place she had ever been was the mainland, and that was cut short when Flo found out that The Olde Spaghetti Factory, where they were eating, wasn’t serving union lettuce.
“I’ve finished my tofu and mung bean sandwich,” said Madeline, standing up and carrying her plate to the sink.
“Want some more?” asked Flo, passing her the tofu and the mung bean bread. “We can be grateful. We may not have Paris but we’ll always have the clever mung bean.”
“It’s nature’s nutritional wonder,” said Mildred.
“No thanks, I’ve got to hurry to get the next ferry. Katherine invited me for a sleepover. Can I stay the whole weekend?”
“Talk about, like, going someplace else,” said Flo. “This is synchronicity. You’re going, like, someplace else!”
“Did Katherine’s mom ask you for the whole weekend?” asked Mildred.
“Go with the flow,” murmured Flo. Then a thought occurred to him. “Hey, that could be, like, my motto or something.”
“You guys are going to Zanky’s for dinner tomorrow night anyway. And Katherine’s mom says she’s always glad I’m there,” said Madeline.
Katherine had five brothers, all of them devoted to soccer, fastball, basketball, football and hockey. Katherine’s mom spent every waking minute of every day driving someone somewhere. Katherine was the only one in the family not sports-inclined. Her mother, Mrs. Vandermeer, didn’t know what to do with her. There seemed to be no place to drive her. When Katherine and Madeline formed a friendship, it was the best thing that had ever happened to Mrs. Vandermeer. Madeline kept Katherine completely entertained, so that Mrs. Vandermeer didn’t have to worry about leaving her in the house undriven.
Madeline opened her knapsack to pack it for the weekend. That’s when she spied the cinnamon sugar Pop-Tarts. Katherine had shoved them in there on Madeline’s last visit. Madeline had forgotten about them. Mrs. Vandermeer did not allow her children to have any sugar. She was a very by-the-book mom, and she believed that sugar caused all kinds of maladies but most especially hyperactivity. There was no evidence to support this, but all of Mrs. Vandermeer’s soccer-mom friends knew it to be true. The same way they knew that if they didn’t drive their children to some form of entertainment or find some way to keep them occupied every second from school closing until bedtime, the children would not know what to do with themselves and would resort to staring at the wall until their heads exploded. Suburban homes were very neat, and no one wanted to be picking brain bits off the walls.
This was the same school of thought that came up with the idea that when children read books, they should summarize each chapter when they were finished with it. Nothing had done so much to kill a generation’s love of reading.
Before Madeline had Katherine as a friend and got to observe suburban life up close, she had worried that Flo and Mildred would be thought eccentric by her schoolmates. But a few visits to the thick of suburban Comox, peering in on Katherine’s life, and Madeline began to feel that the way she had been brought up was not so outrageous after all. What her parents were doing on Hornby was no crazier than anything anyone else was doing.
Katherine thought Madeline’s life was fabulous, being left to read in a hammock all day and never pressured to join groups or go to day camps. Learning silversmithing and wearing long peasant dresses and participating in magical candlelit celebrations on the beach. Having deer grazing outside your bedroom window and growing your own food. Katherine thought Madeline had it made in the shade. But, Madeline pointed out, Katherine didn’t have to worry about money, her parents worried about that for her. And her roof never leaked and mice never invaded, and her parents came to her parent-teacher conferences and graduations and school events. And she didn’t have to buy her shoes at the Salvation Army. And, most importantly, Katherine had a college fund.
“Well, your mom lets you eat sugar,” countered Katherine.
“If we ever have it around, which we usually don’t because we can’t afford it. We have beehives and my mom uses honey instead. You get store-bought treats.”
“Sugar-free store-bought treats,” Katherine reminded her bitterly.
The last time Madeline had been to Katherine’s, they had come in on Mrs. Vandermeer having a fit in the kitchen.
“Look what Uncle Kevin sent us. It must have been him. Who else would send us a case of cinnamon sugar Pop-Tarts? Ever since he moved to the States, he sends us the most -outrageous products. It’s kindly meant, but he should know better than to send us sugar! It was bad enough when he sent us a case of spray cheese in a can.”
Mrs. Vandermeer was pacing about her granite kitchen island, on which the Pop-Tarts sat, giving them sudden piercing looks from different angles as if she could intimidate them into being asparagus.
“Wow,” said Katherine. “A whole case.”
“Wow is not the word I would have chosen. My goodness, it’s not as if the boys require any more energy. That’s all I need, children bouncing off the walls. Madeline, I don’t mean you. Or Katherine. I know you two aren’t”--Mrs. Vandermeer cleared her throat tactfully--“overly energetic.”
This was a tiny sore point in Katherine’s family. Mr. Vandermeer had been tremendously energetic in his youth and now worked a full-time job and coached five soccer teams. He was the epitome of oat bran–eating, jogging, weight-lifting health. Mrs. Vandermeer had been a cheerleader, a gymnast and a soccer player, and her scrapbooking was prodigious. She had masses of energy. The boys were all involved in sports every waking moment. They glowed with health and vigor. Katherine’s favorite thing to do was to sit on the heating grate and stare into space.
When Katherine and Madeline did this in tandem, which they did even when the heat wasn’t on, Mrs. Vandermeer wondered what in the world was the matter with them, but she didn’t have time to investigate. She was very, very busy. In the suburbs busyness was next to godliness. When Madeline, who loved the woods and ocean and all their entangled life-forms, saw the tiny treeless plots with the houses cheek by jowl--everything paved and cemented--she thought privately that people in the suburbs needed to be busy every second because if they stopped long enough to look around, they might notice where they were living.
“I wonder what these Pop-Tarts would do to you. . . .” Mrs. Vandermeer peered speculatively at the girls. For a second her maternal instincts were supplanted by scientific curiosity. Then she shook herself.
A car horn honked.
“Oh, the boys!” said Mrs. Vandermeer, looking at her watch. “We’re going to be late for practice. Stop that honking!” she called, scurrying around to gather her things. “Katherine, be a dear and find some way to dispose of the Pop-Tarts before I get back with the boys. I don’t want them to even see them.”
Katherine nodded. It in no way interfered with her and Madeline’s afternoon plan. They had the same plan pretty much every afternoon when Madeline came over. They went out to the gazebo, lay on the porch swing and the big wicker recliner and read. Katherine and Madeline were each in the middle of a Louisa May Alcott book. Katherine was reading Little Women and Madeline was reading Eight Cousins. They never did chapter summaries at school. They simply refused. They never let anyone tell them how they should read a book or what they should think about it. They had too much respect for the books and the books’ ability to speak for themselves.