“Oh, Amelia Bedelia, your first day of work, and I can’t be here. But I made a list for you. You just read the list and you’ll be fine,” said Mrs. Rogers.
Mrs. Rogers got into the car with Mr. Rogers. They drove away.
“My, what nice folks. I’m going to like working here,” said Amelia Bedelia.
Amelia Bedelia went inside. “Such a grand house. These must be rich folks. But I must get to work. Here I stand just looking. And me with a whole list of things to do.” She stood there a minute longer, clenching and unclenching her fists.
“I think I’ll make a surprise for them.” So Amelia Bedelia made them a surprise. She did a little of one thing, then a little of another. Soon it was ready.
“There,” said Amelia Bedelia. “That’s done.” Amelia Bedelia liked it when things were finished.
“Now let’s see what this list says.” Amelia Bedelia read the list, then sat down carefully in the chair facing the window. She had read the list. She had done her job. Now it was time to wait. Amelia Bedelia always did what she had told, and she remembered what Mrs. Rogers had said to her before she left. You just read the list and you’ll be fine. Her hands sat in her lap. She sat in her chair. The chair sat in the room.
“I’m fine,” Amelia Bedelia said to the list. The light moved across the room slowly. Then it was night.
Amelia Bedelia heard the door open. “The folks are back,” she said to her fists. She rushed out to meet them.
“Amelia Bedelia,” Mrs. Rogers said, “why are all the lights off?” She went into the kitchen. “Where is the dinner I asked you to prepare? Why aren’t the curtains drawn or the cupboards dusted or any of the rooms –” Mrs. Rogers broke off in impatience and rushed upstairs to see what else Amelia Bedelia had left undone.
Then Mrs. Rogers saw Amelia Bedelia’s surprise.
Mrs. Rogers came back downstairs, and her eyes were two green holes in a white face.
“Amelia,” she said, and then she sat down. There was no chair, so she sat on the floor. “Amelia.”
“You look surprised,” Amelia said, and then she barked out a laugh. “I’m so glad.”
“What on earth is going on?” cried Mr. Rogers. “Where is my dinner? Amelia Bedelia, what is the meaning of this?”
“You told me to read the list,” Amelia Bedelia said, holding her fists out and pulling them back to herself. (Her fists belonged to her.) “I read the list. I always do just as I am told, Mr. Rogers.”
“Helen, what’s the matter?” Mr. Rogers said, shaking his wife from her spot on the floor. She was lying down. “What’s gotten into her?”
“She went upstairs,” Amelia Bedelia said.
“Upstairs,” Mrs. Rogers whispered. She did not get up.
“Damn all women,” Mr. Rogers said, not unkindly, and shot up the stairs. He did not come back down.
“I changed things,” Amelia Bedelia said to Mrs. Rogers on the floor. “Did I change them enough?”
Mrs. Rogers opened her mouth.
Mrs. Rogers meant to tell Amelia Bedelia she was fired.
But before she could get the words out, Amelia Bedelia spoke first.
“Anything that happens in your house is your responsibility,” she said. “I live in your house, and I belong to you now. And I’ll do anything you tell me to, just as you say. And if anything happens to me, in your house, it’s your responsibility. So I must never get hurt in this house. And I will always do just as you say. Do you want me to bring you a cup of tea now?”
Mrs. Rogers had forgotten what she was going to say.
“I’m going to stay here,” Amelia Bedelia said happily. “You don’t have to decide about the tea just now.”
“After all, today was only my first day,” Amelia Bedelia said. “We’re going to have a lot of time to get acquainted with one another.”
MALLORY
I can’t even read it yet, I’m so anxious.
It was poop, right? A poop surprise from Amelia Bedelia?
Oh my god, Mallory. I almost prefer when you get explicit because my imagination won’t stop and I need to lie down.
(This is where I confess to never having read a single Amelia Bedelia story. I can’t, now).
What…what did she DO????
She made them a surprise. Amelia Bedelia likes to make things.
Did the Rogers have pets? I can’t remember. I hope Amelia didn’t do anything to a pet. :
The Rogers have a lot of things.
DAMN IT MALLORY. I’m going to have to find this book and reread it now to see if there are any hints about what horrible thing Amelia could have done.
Shit I think it’s the one with the baby shit shit shit.
I think the baby was another family. She went to babysit for them, it wasn’t the Rogers’s baby.
That brings me too much relief to be precisely normal, thank you.
Now they have one more thing.
something nasty in the woodshed upstairs.
Sure you did, but did it see you, baby?
I have always refused to read these books to my children. And now I know I am fully justified in that stance.
Don’t worry, Mallory will eliminate “acceptable books to read to children” one by one until we can only read them “Texts from Jane Eyre”.
And now it’s an episode of Hannibal.
A-meal-ia Bedelia Du Maurier.
I KNEW NOT TO BELIEVE YOU. “Not terrifying at all.” Pfft.
WHAT THE FUCK, MALLORY
Hahahaha, no better story to make totally disturbing. Thank you for this on a Monday.
Yes! I bear no great ill-will towards Amelia Bedelia, but also no great love, so this one really hits that sweet spot.
Oh, I do. I never liked Amelia Bedelia as a kid, despite her prowess with baked goods, and this just justifies my antipathy. When someone gave my daughter one of the A.B. books, it was immediately “donated to the library.”
(ETA: spell-check wants to change “Bedelia” to “Bedevil” which is very fitting tbh.)
Oh, I have been waiting for this one in my deepest heart, and it is glorious, Mallory, thank you.
MALLORY WHY
I always hated Amelia Bedelia. This just proves I was right.
I always hated Amelia Bedelia. Even having it read to me as a small child was maddening. Being aggressively obtuse is not an endearing quality, it just means that nothing ever gets done properly.
…wow i have strong feelings about picture books apparently
I’m glad to see that there are so many of us who hated these books. Mallory is just making subtext text.
As a parent reading them to kids, they’re doubly awful because (a) not funny (b) the kids don’t get the “jokes” anyway so there’s no point.
Moving that literalism to the sinister side is brilliant.
Those books were precisely calculated to enrage me when I was a kid who twigged early on to the fact that adults were not immune from the literalness, immaturity, and sheer folly that they liked to attribute to children.
I recommend skimming Goodreads’ “Favorite books from my childhood” list to rediscover feelings of childhood fury at the classics. Examples: The Borrowers (stealing is wrong! Don’t touch my stuff!); Stuart Little (human women do not give birth to mice, I don’t want to live in a world where that can happen out of the blue).
You and Anne Carroll Moore. It’s because of her that White revised Stuart Little so that in the first paragraph, instead of being “born,” the mouse just “arrives.”
as a very rule-oriented child Amelia always unnerved me. This confirms what I knew all along.
Me too! I found those books very stressful as a child. It’s like, I struggle enough trying to figure out what people want, don’t add in weird literalness & wordplay.
As a very rule-oriented child, that damn Cat in the hat always unnerved me. SO STRESSFUL.
Cat in the Hat is definitely about when you are housesitting as a teenager and your friends come over and get drunk while you anxiously beg them not to leave sex stains in the master bedroom.
he is also the worst. Imagine then together. *shudder*
Look on the bright side- maybe she killed him!
Oh Cat in the Hat is TERRIBLE. I mean, I was fine with it as a kid, but looking back on it as an adult, I’m like, “So this stranger shows up while these kids are home alone and insists that they play dangerous, damaging “games” with him, even though they don’t want to? Yeah, not creepy at all.” >_>
I found them very unnerving for the opposite reason – if those mistakes are so easy to make, then what mistakes could *I* be making it and not even know!
High five to all the rule-oriented kids out there. Growing up, I found Amelia Bedelia amusing in the same way that I now find the Real Housewives of Wherever amusing: trainwrecks that are fun to watch, but with a sense of exceeding gladness that I will never have these people – or people at all like them – in my real life, because that would be simply intolerable.
I honestly got confused for a second (why are we talking about my least favorite kids book on the Toast?) and then I remembered where I was.
Wh… why did it have to be Mr. ROGERS D:
It’s a good thing I read this in the middle of the day because that is NIGHTMARE FODDER.
Jesus Ever Loving Christ, Mallory.
Well what else can you expect from a woman who displays such willful ignorance of the conventions of human speech and behavior?
There’s nothing worse than a horrible deed performed by someone who can’t stop smiling every so slightly. Call it the Umbridge Rule.
oh gods, she went upstairs
why, Ameilia Bedilia?!
What does it mean?!?!?
But what about the part where she makes a really good cake and it makes everything okay?
I know! I loved Amelia Bedelia and this is so so so bad. I kept waiting to hear about the wonderful food she made and was forgiven.
edited to add: Bad in the sense of horrifying, not in the sense of poorly done. Mallory is amazing at these kind of things.
Pie! Lemon meringue pie.
Sorry, I read the “surprise” part and immediately thought “I promised myself if I ever got in here, I would do to his toilets what he did to the American middle class.” and then the whole thing was kind of funny
“By the way, I counted twelve bathrooms in your house. Did I miss any?”
“No… there’s only eight.”
See, this is why Mallory is a monster. By leaving the surprise unspecified, our imaginations go wild, and no matter how awful we imagine the surprise to be, we know that whatever we imagined says more about ourselves than it says about Mallory.
You made me think of horrible things, Mallory. I do not like realizing what thoughts I am capable of.
Never stop this series.
And Mallory, having written her story, remains unchanged.
We, having read, can never un-know the horrors we can show ourselves in our own minds. We have read, and we have imagined, and we are never quite the same again.
I am really worried that I can’t think of anything that would have exactly that reaction. What does THAT say about me?
Maybe she found their fetish room.
Also I can’t decide if it’s perfect that this is the only thing in the ‘surprises’ tag or if I wish there were more.
This is so wonderful. I hate those damn books; somehow my kids love them. “Intellectually challenged servant takes everything literally: Hilarity Ensues!” Ugh. It is sinister as hell and Mallory proves her genius once again by bringing that to the fore.
Was it an Amelia Bedelia book where that kid refused to finish all the food on his plate so Amelia (or was that Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle?) gave his mother sets of progressively smaller dishes to serve his food on until he was literally exhausted from starvation? I think the last meal was a thimble of milk and a single cornflake. But by then the kid is starving and eats the whole thing and the mother has broken this kid’s stubbornness in not finishing his food.
Seems relayed to blanket training (breaking the kid’s spirit).
Well, now I’m all depressed. Kids books are awful.
Yes! Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle! I’m sad those books don’t seem to be available for Kindle so I can reread them and gawk at the cheery horror! Mrs. PW was, like, from the school of Mary Poppins Fucked Up Child Rearing. (The one that really got to me, though, was the girl who got dirty enough to grow radishes on her skin.)
eta: My re-read of the Anastasia books did not disappoint me, though.
My goodness, yes! That is the very book and episode I cite whenever I get into a Traumatizing Childhood Book competition with someone. As a kid, her approach is horrifying; as an adult, it’s creative and devious and effective as hell.
The Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books are super entertaining when you read them as a kid, but then looking back it’s pretty horrifying. Like, this is an entire town full of adults who have no idea how to influence their children’s behavior, and instead of taking a parenting class, they turn to the friendly neighborhood witch to devise elaborate and extremely specific tortures to inflict on the kids. I’m sorry, what?
I’m reading them to my almost-five-year-old now and she CACKLES with glee over the cures every time. She will say triumphantly, “It will be a pill, a powder or a tonic. They must learn their lesson!”
I think what she loves about each story is how clueless the parents are and how appreciative they are when their child ceases behaving in a frustrating way, because the idea of children having that much power over parents just delights her.
Me, I just want the kind of life where you can apparently send your children tearing all over town and nobody raises an eye or calls the cops while vilifying you as a free-range parent.
I’m just waiting for Mallory’s version of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. That old woman’ll be on steroids.
oh my GOD
I love how this makes Amelia Bedelia the malevolent version of a house elf or a Brownie or domovoi or whatever. Even as a kid, I found the idea of magical sprites in the house secretly doing stuff until/unless you offended them kind of creepy, so this is just the logical extension.
He did not come back down.
If anyone here can mock up an intro sequence for American Horror Story: Amelia Bedelia, it’s pretty much all I want in the world right now.
Mallory you broke my brain.
I have just realized that it may be Amelia Bedelia who is to blame for my irrational hatred of homonym confusion in idiom.
I also still think it’s the baby and I am not okay.
The first AB book, at least, which this seems to be modeled on, has no baby.
Yay, there’s a limit to my querulous fear!
It’s
This
*tries again*
Mallory. MALLORY. You magnificent monster. I just.
Oh, the tone. The tone, the pace, the fists, the FISTS, the
Amelia
You’re breaking my heart
You’re shaking my confidence daily
Oh Bedelia
I’m down on my knees
I’m begging you please to go home
*shiver*
hyperventilating
why won’t he come back down
He found the rest of the surprise. Amelia likes things to be finished.
Crikey. I started reading this without looking at the tag to see what series this was. And now OH MY GOD WHAT IF SHE’S IN MY HOUSE. brb, fleeing to the ends of the earth.
If it makes y’all feel any better, the Rogers didn’t have a baby, the Lanes did.
No
That was unfair
I double-checked to see if it was a children’s story made horrific after the first line but the title didn’t warn me and then it was too late
YOU DIDN’T FOLLOW THE RULES
Terrifying.
this is what happens when Amelia reads the Ayn Rand series late at night on a serious bender
There's also Struwwelpeter's "The Story of Augustus Who Did Not Have Any Soup," where a little boy refuses to eat his soup, and on the principle that children must learn to eat what they're told to or starve, his parents allow him to starve. And then place a bowl of soup on his grave.
I'm just waiting for Mallory's version of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. That old woman'll be on steroids.
This is the most frightening thing I’ve ever read.