# Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 47

AS she greeted her guests, a tornado of children swept into the front hall by her, the Mullinses crying:
"Ma! where's the gum? Ma! Ma! where's the gum?"
"Give me a wad, too, Birdie," commanded Mr. Mullins. "I know some folks don't think gum's elegant, but when you're covering your hundreds on a dusty road, it does help, don't it, Birdie?"
Alice looked upon her offspring tucking the forbidden fruit away in their jaws. She went to the kitchen to placate Laurie and order innumerable broiled chickens.
Looking out of the kitchen window, Alice saw what seemed to her the disintegration of her family. She never had seen less lovely children. They embodied all the unpleasant traits of both parents, and they had doubled their parents' high spirits, which they gave vent to by noise and by monkeyshines. Now one Charley-Chaplined across the grass: he was followed by an ecstatic Robert. Jamie, with his feet at right angles, waddled gravely after. Both the Marcey boys had followed in their father's footsteps; they had found their ideal in Bill Mullins, Junior.
The Mullins boy of Sara's age was engaged in teaching her to make new and extraordinarily unpleasant faces. She heard the little girl cry:
"Let's play Slump, and the boys try to get us to walk."
It was a game that needed no explanation to Sara. Both little girls flopped upon the grass, limp and un​budgable objects. The boys tried to put them on their feet, but it was as if they had grown one with the earth. The boys puffed and pulled: Sara and Beryl Mullins resisted violently by becoming as jellyfishes. It was evident Sara needed no one to teach her complete relaxation. Her bones were non-existent. Feet no longer had any connection with standing. When they put her on them they gave way, and she slid back to earth. The Mullins boys pulled at her as though they would wrench her arms from their sockets. Sara squawked like a peacock. She taunted them with the insults of a gutter-snipe. For the benefit of the Mullinses a vocabulary which no nice little girl should have picked up came to the surface. Then, in the midst of her laughing, she choked.
"Aw, gee!" Billy Mullins cried, "she's swallered the gum! Stand her on her head. You guys take her by a leg and I'll keep on whacking her," for during this time he had been whacking Sara vigorously, who, purple in the face, still spluttered and coughed.
They took her each one by the leg. They stood her on her head. Like white and pink petals her little skirts hung limply downward over her red curls. It was an indecorous spectacle for any mother to witness. It was no wonder Alice flew out of the kitchen, crying:
"I'll stand no more of this!"
At this moment Mr. Mullins and Tom came out on the piazza and laughed uproariously at this mortifying sight. Polite neighbors passing on the street looked round, surprised, and looked away again. Before Alice could reach them, however, Sara had remarked:
"I'm all right now. You keep hold of my legs and let me be a wheelbarrow."
Upon this, with agility, she walked away on her two ​hands, while Bill Mullins held her firmly by the legs and cried to his sister:
"Hey, Beryl, you come and race Sara. Let's have a wheelbarrow race."
"Sara," cried her exasperated mother, "come into the house with me!"
"Why?" cried Sara. "I haven't done nothing. I haven't done a eenty, weenty thing."
"You know what you have done," Alice cried. "You used horrible language."
"I didn't use any different language than all of um." Alas, this was too true. Alice took refuge in the fact that Sara had been standing on her head.
"But I didn't stooded myself on my head!" wailed Sara.
A savage instinct almost mastered Alice. She felt a desire to spank everybody in sight. She would have liked to begin with Jamie, who was Chaplining around with grotesque solemnity. She knew he would continue to do this for weeks and weeks. She wanted to spank Sara, and oh! how she wanted to get a hand upon each and every Mullins. But instead she had to listen to Bill Mullins booming forth:
"Aw, come, Mis' Marcey, let 'em have some fun! When kids is oatsy, shows they're healthy!"
It seemed to Alice no less than a nightmare when, after a supper which the Mullins unanimously termed "swell eats," she saw all seven little children pass by the window waddling after the manner of that eminent film artist, Mr. Chaplin, and all of them chewing gum. Now Chaplining and gum-chewing were two things upon which Alice had set her foot. Tom's eye caught hers. A look of sympathy passed between them. Mr. Mullins flooded on serenely, saying:
"Yes, sir, I cleaned up a hundred thousand simoleons ​in the first three years. You ought to have seen me work my way up from a flivver to this one I've got."
By her husband's swift look Alice realized that peace between them was restored, and that Tom Marcey had indulged in as much reminiscence concerning the little red schoolhouse as he had a mind for just then. So great was his reaction that Sunday morning at the breakfast table, he glared fiercely at his offspring and said:
"Let me catch one of you waddling around like a goose, or chewing a piece of gum, or saying 'youse guys,' or in any other way acting like congenital idiots or defectives instead of normal children, and I'll punish that child as I have never punished any child before."