Only Children by Alison Lurie

Author:Alison Lurie [Lurie, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-7121-6
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-10-12T23:38:00+00:00

July 6

IT IS HOT IN the sun between the big rosebushes and the wall of Anna’s house. Even the wind is hot, as if somebody was blowing it with Honey’s new hair-dryer. It is awful early for it to be so hot; not even time to leave for the picnic that her mother and Lolly’s mother and Anna are fixing in the kitchen.

She and Lolly started to help them, but then Anna said they were eating more egg salad than they were putting into the sandwiches, and why didn’t they go outside and play croquet for a while? But Mary Ann said no it was too hot, and anyhow they wanted to do some real work, not just play games. So Anna said well if they liked they could go and catch some of the Japanese beetles that were eating up her rosebushes, and she would pay them ten cents a Mason jar.

So they did. Only Lolly quit after they brought the first jar full of bugs inside, buzzing and shining greeny-brown, and she saw Anna ladle boiling hot water into it from the big kettle on the stove, and all the beetles wiggled their legs and died. Lolly screamed Oh and said it was horrible even if they did eat roses, and she wasn’t going to catch any more. So Anna sent her out to the garden for lettuce instead.

Mary Ann kept on catching beetles. If she could fill another jar all by herself she would get ten cents more, plus five is fifteen, a week’s allowance. It isn’t hard work either like weeding or raking leaves, but almost sort of fun. Anna’s roses aren’t as prickly as the ones Bill brings home in green tissue paper from New York City when it is Honey’s birthday or Mother’s Day or she is mad at him. They’re bigger and floppier, with more leaves, and they look like they were made of cotton instead of silk or satin.

The Japanese beetles are all over the rosebushes, sitting on the leaves and buds and exploring inside the flowers. They never see you coming the way flies do; you can just pinch them between your thumb and fingers and they can’t get away. They feel light and dry and wiggly. And then you drop them into the jar, and they are too dumb to fly out again except by mistake.

“Ugh, those ugly old Japanese beetles, Ah can’t stand to look at them,” Honey screamed out when they brought the first jarful into the kitchen. But really they aren’t ugly; they are kind of pretty, with shiny polished backs that change in the light from green to brown like the taffeta cushions on Mama-Lou’s bed down South. They have little black stick legs, and tiny papery unfolding wings that aren’t much use, because they can’t fly very well, or very fast.

The beetles aren’t old either; probably they are mostly very young, since bugs don’t live too long. But they do look Japanese—like the made in

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