Cheaper by the Dozen

it might have been Dad, sitting there in his own chair.
    "From this minute on, pipe down every last one of you, or I'll lambaste the hides off you. I'll fix you so you can't sit down for a month. Do you understand? Does everybody understand? In case you don't realize it, I've had enough!"
    With that, determined to show us she wasn't going to let us spoil her meal, she put a piece of pie in her mouth. But she was so upset that she choked, and slowly turned a deep purple. She clutched at her throat. We were afraid she was dying, and were ashamed of ourselves.
    Tom, watching at the door, saw his duty. Putting aside his fear of her, he ran into the dining room and slapped her on the back. Then he grabbed her arms and held them high over her head.
    "You'll be all right in a minute, Aunt Anne," he said.
    His system worked. She gurgled and finally caught her breath. Then, remembering her dignity, she jerked her arms out of his hands and drew herself up to her full height.
    "Keep your hands to yourself, Grieves," she said in a tone that indicated her belief that his next step would be to loosen her corset. "Don't ever let me hear you make the fatal mistake of calling me 'Aunt Anne' again. And after this, mind your own"—she looked slowly around the table and then decided to say it anyway —"damned business."
    There was no doubt after that about who was boss, and Aunt Anne had no further trouble with us. When Dad and Mother returned home, all of us expected to be disciplined. But we had misjudged Aunt Anne.
    "You look like you've lost weight," Dad said to her. "The children didn't give you any trouble, did they?"
    "Not a bit," said Aunt Anne. "They behaved beautifully, once we got to understand each other. We got along just fine, didn't we, children?"
    She reached out fondly and rumpled Billy's hair, which didn't need rumpling.
    "Ouch," Billy whispered to her, grinning in relief. "It still hurts. Have a heart."

    We had better success with another guest whom we set out deliberately to discourage. She was a woman psychologist who came to Montclair every fortnight from New York to give us intelligence tests. It was her own idea, not Dad's or Mother's, but they welcomed her. She was planning to publish a paper about the effects of Dad's teaching methods on our intelligence quotients.
    She was thin and sallow, with angular features and a black moustache, not quite droopy enough to hide a horsey set of upper teeth. We hated her and suspected that the feeling was mutual.
    At first her questions were legitimate enough: Arithmetic, spelling, languages, geography, and the sort of purposeful confusion—about ringing numbers and underlining words— in which some psychologists place particular store.
    After we had completed the initial series of tests, she took us one by one into the parlor for personal interviews. Even Mother and Dad weren't allowed to be present.
    The interviews were embarrassing and insulting.
    "Does it hurt when your mother spanks you?" she asked each of us, peering searchingly into our eyes and breathing into our faces. "You mean your mother never spanks you?" She seemed disappointed. "Well, how about your father? Oh, he does?" That appeared to be heartening news. "Does your mother pay more attention to the other children than she does to you? How many baths do you take a week? Are you sure? Do you think it would be nice to have still another baby brother? You do? Goodness!"
    We decided that if Dad and Mother knew the kinds of questions we were being asked, they wouldn't like them any better than we did. Anne and Ernestine had made up their minds to explain the situation to them, when destiny delivered the psychologist into our hands, lock, stock and moustache.
    Mother had been devising a series of job aptitude tests, and the desk by her bed was piled with pamphlets and magazines on psychology. Ernestine was running idly through them one night, while Mother was reading aloud to us from The Five Little Peppers and How they Grew, when she came across a batch of intelligence tests. One of them was the test which the New York woman was in the process of giving us—not the embarrassing personal questions, but the business of circling numbers, spelling, and filling in blanks. The correct answers were in the back.
    "Snake's hips," Ernestine crowed. "Got it!"
    Mother looked up absently from her book. "Don't mix up my work, Ernie," she said. "What are you after?"
    "Just want to borrow something," Ern told her.
    "Well,