Rereading My Childhood: The Baby-Sitters Club

#21: Mallory and the Trouble With Twins

My sister and I are only separated by a year and because we are so close in age, sometimes relatives gave us matching gifts, particularly for Christmas. One year we each received a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers stuffed doll, and in a different year, we received matching baskets of goodies. We even had matching furry white coats that made us look like Frosty the Snowman's illegitimate children with a She-bear.

However, not all the gifts were so innocuous. One year, my grandmother paid someone in her retirement community to paint our faces on sweatshirts - and she gave him our school pictures. And not just any school picture - the school picture in which I braided my hair into tight curls and wore a cowboy-style shirt with fringe. Utterly mortifying. If only I had the sense of humor I have now. I'd save the sweatshirt and eventually turn it into a throw pillow.

I imagine this problem would be worse for twins. Not the horrifying picture of my own painted, curled visage smiling awkwardly from my chest - but the identical gifts. It seems to imply that you're not two separate people but one duplex of a person.

In The Baby-Sitters Club #21: Mallory and the Trouble With Twins, the BSC has a new client who is aggravating the club, but Mallory is up to the challenge. Or is she? (Of course, she is, but let's pretend to have some suspense, huh? It's a kids' book from 1989, calm down, dude. Sheesh.)

Mallory Pike, the ginger-est, blindest, and braces-ist of the Baby-Sitters Club, wants to get her ears pierced. This seemed to be a common plot point of late-'80s to early-'90s culture. The sheer act of getting your ears pierced seemed to signal some serious maturing for parents. There's an episode of Full House wherein Danny Tanner doesn't want her daughter, Stephanie Tanner, to get her ears pierced, so she lets Kimmy Gibbler do it and it gets infected. And there's an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer gets angry after Bart gets an earring. Now, as I am doing a rewatch of every Degrassi episode, Ellie comes in with holes all over her body and Sean has both his ears pierced. I remember getting my ears pierced when I was, like, five at the Claire's. It seems that ear piercing is not the direct stripper pole straight to hell after all.

But I digress. Mallory wants pierced ears and her parents think she's too young. Or, she assumes her parents won't allow pierced ears - she hasn't asked them.

After the obligatory pages describing each babysitter (including referring to Claudia as "exotic" with "almond-shaped eyes'' - oof), and pages explaining how the club works, we have a meeting. And surprise! Logan is there. It makes the girls nervous as if they've never seen Logan before. I feel like he's been around enough that they should be used to having him there. I remember the boys I was friends with in middle school - at some point, they're barely visible.

During the meeting, Mrs. Arnold, the mother of twin girls, Carolyn and Marilyn, needs a steady sitter while she works on a fundraising campaign for Stoneybrook Elementary. Of course, our favorite redhead takes the job.

Mallory arrives at the Arnold household and the twins are dressed in identical outfits - down to the haircuts. They are wearing bracelets with their names on them, but the bracelets match (except the name printed on them). Mrs. Arnold herself is quite a fussy woman, wearing matching bows in her hair, shirt, belt, and shoes. There will be no pattern mixing in her house!

When Mrs. Arnold leaves, Mallory offers the girls her Kid-Kit. Carolyn chooses to play with some puzzles while Marilyn chooses some books, including a book called Baby Island, which is real and not just a bad sitcom with one season from the '90s.

Mallory remarks that the twins are cute and "look like bookends." This prompts the twins to speak to each other in their "twin language," which is just nonsense and they try to trick Mallory by removing their name bracelets. However, it's time for Marilyn to practice the piano and Mallory is finally able to tell which one is Marilyn until the end of her job.