Sweet Valley Twins #87 - The Mother-Daughter Switch

[dirtywingsgirl]

Elizabeth is wearing something…awful. Harry High pants much? And she has the huffiest look on her face. I bet she gets that look a lot, especially when she’s yelling at Jessica. Close-up, Alice looks like Pluto the Disney dog - and lol @ the videotape-sized walkman in her hand…ah, the  mid-90s. I can’t really snark at Jess there, but I will remark that she’s doing a pretty rad glare. And appears to be wearing cons.

As you can probably guess, the basic premise of this book is that both the twins and Alice decide to switch places to teach each other the lesson that being a kid and being an adult (respectively) is a harder job. I doubt any mom would ever agree to this, but this is Sweet Valley, so, when in Rome……….switch places with your parent. At first, this book seemed like it will be awesome, but I sadly found it kind of boring to read.

The book begins with Jessica having a think about responsibility. She has a fall while rollerblading and a crotchety old neighbour chews her out for almost crushing her garden flowers. “Responsibility!” Crotchety Neighbour croaks in Jessica’s face several times. Jessica feels huffy and goes home, thinking about how very responsible she is and how Crotchety Neighbour doesn’t know what she’s talking about. (This is oh-so-evident when Steven reminds Jessica that she and Elizabeth are holding a Mother-Daughter picnic for Mother’s Day that evening in their backyard, and both Jess and Liz have forgotten that they were meant to set up the party. Wow! The SV writers have discovered irony!) The reason the twins spaced is that they’ve been so busy: Jessica’s been collecting sponsors for her Rollerblade-a-thon, and Elizabeth has been doing a media class project (which involves taping three television programs and reviewing them. I can hardly think of an easier project, I have no idea why Swiss-scholarship-winning Elizabeth finds it so taxing). The twins have 20 minutes to get the party ready, and no napkins or food or anything.

They reason that sensible Alice will have noticed the lack of supplies and gone shopping for them, but when their mom comes home, she is aghast at the girl’s Lack of Forethought and Responsibility. She has been really busy lately with a design project (coincidentally for Mrs. Wolsky, the aforementioned Crotchety Neighbour). Alice hasn’t had time to get napkins and soda and ketchup and stuff.

It’s, of course, at this moment that guests start arriving. The girls improvise and serve lemonade (except it’s weak ‘cause they only have one package), and bologna, tomato and mustard sandwiches (it’s all they had in the house).  Janet and the Unicorns are bitches about this. Janet calls the lemonade “water-ade”. You could do better, Janet. Come on, what else is yellow…and watery…? The BBQ is basically a disaster.

Alice blows a fuse after the unsuccessful BBQ and says that the girls let her down. Which they totally did. The girls moan about how busy they’ve been, but Alice says rollerblading and movie reviews are a breeze compared to a full-time career and taking care of three kids. Jessica suggests they trade places for the weekend - Alice can do the twins’ projects, and Liz and Jess can decorate Mrs. Wolsky’s sunporch. For some stupid, bad-parenting reason, Alice agrees. Who would let 12-year-olds decorate a sunporch? Jessica would probably deck it out in wall-to-wall purple, and Elizabeth would make it too boring even for an old person. Anyway, after this agreement, Alice immediately starts acting weird (in my opinion). All flippant and sarcastic and immature and strange. Examples:

“What kinds of shows do you think you’ll pick?” Elizabeth asked.
“Oh, I don’t know yet,” Mrs. Wakefield said lightly. “I may not pick anything till nine o’clock Sunday night. Who knows? Gosh, we’ve only just started, and already I’m having loads of fun being a kid!”

“What, just because I’ve never been on rollerblades before?” their mother replied. “All kids can rollerblade. Now that I’m a kid, it’ll be easy. And in exchange for that, all you have to do is decorate Mrs. Wolsky’s sunporch,” Mrs. Wakefield finished.
“Oh, it’s just the sunporch?” Elizaveth exclaimed, relieved.
“Just the sunporch,” Mrs. Wakefield repeated, flashing them a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin.

“And we get to boss Steven around as much as we want?”
“Well, you can’t put him in any kind of danger,” Mrs. Wakefield explained. “But I’m sure you can have lots of fun with him all the same.”

Er, yeah. As if you’d sacrifice your interior design business and your son just to get one up on your kids. Not that I’d expect anything less from a Sweet Valley parent!

Mrs. Wakefield runs off to take a walk, leaving the twins to clean up the failed BBQ mess. She insists that she must go off now because, “If you were a kid, you’d understand it has to be done right now!” Elizabeth asks if her mother is teasing her. It’s been said many times before, but for someone so ‘smart’, Elizabeth sure can be slow on the uptake. Meanwhile, Steven has been filming them the whole time because for some reason he has a video camera now and is doing some mysterious ‘project’ on how weird his family is.

Mrs. Wolsky calls and is all demanding and bitchy about her sunporch. Jess starts to understand why her mom has been so irritable lately. Mr & Mrs Wakefield go and play on the local playground (I’m sure that’s all they were doing ;)). Jessica is horrified when she hears of this, and wonders if her friends saw. Then the parents mention going to the beach the next day. Jess begins to look forward to coming too, until they throw the whole “You can’t come with us! What would our friends think?” thing back in her face. Then the parents stay up late playing music (like Elton John), and the girls yell at them to get to bed right now. The twins realize (shock! horror!) that it's kinda difficult being a parent.

Then we have a weird moment from Mrs. Wakefield’s point-of-view the next morning. She revels in eating sugar donuts, channel surfing, and having no responsibilities. But then she tries to go door-to-door to collect sponsors for Jessica’s rollerblade-a-thon, and everyone laughs in her face because 1) she looks too old to rollerblade and 2) it’s Jessica’s name on the sign-up sheet, and it says her age is twelve.

Steve secretly films his mother doing this (those words sound a bit suss). He also catches her on tape after a while - writing fake pledges down! Gasp, Alice, you mischievous child!

Oh, and Alice doesn’t know how to work a VCR. She accidentally tapes static. Just because you were born before the eighties does not mean you are technologically useless. You’d think if you invested in a VCR, you’d learn how to use it - or like…READ THE MANUAL.

Turns out Alice’s plan with the pledges is to pretend to Jessica that she has gotten people to sponsor her, but really she will donate the $75 herself. Alice, you crafty dog. Jess and Liz parent Alice by being all “please leave us a note when you leave the house”. It’s interesting that Liz and Jess are both parents. A same-sex parented family. How progressive. Lol, Alice flips through TV stations to find chat shows with themes like “People over 30 who have learned to program their VCRs” and “Parents who do their children’s homework assignments for them”. Wtf? Nice humour attempt, ghostwriters.

The twins notice Mrs. Wakefield’s kid troubles and giggle over how clever they are. They notice Mrs. Wolsky has a totally immaculate house and start trying to design a sunporch for her. The twins look in some catalogs and realize that furniture is really expensive - like, thousands of dollars expensive. For some reason they worry that they have to get cheap stuff because they will be paying for this out of their own pocket. They wonder how their mother affords this. Um, wtf? This is not how interior design works.

The twins bribe Steven not to help Mrs. Wakefield with the VCR. He makes them promise to help him with his mysterious video project.

Random fact: Mr. Wakefield tapes PBS documentary shows with titles like “The Private Life of the Rabbit”.

The mysterious video project turns out to be putting countless tomatoes in the microwave til they pop and filming the result, which Steven calls “instant blood!”. Um, okay.

Mrs. Wakefield begs Steven to help her with the VCR, but he gives her bizarre directions that don’t make sense (stuff like “the video channel has to be an even number to record a comedy”, lol). She cottons on, and lies to him that there’s a basketball game on tonight that he might want to record. Steven sees through the lie, but comments that it was a nice try, and like something the twins might do.

The twins make awful pizza for dinner. Everyone gags. They clog up the sink disposal with pizza. Yawn.

The twins go shopping for furniture. The salesman totally patronizes them, which is rude. Jess squares her shoulders and announces that they’re shopping for their mother, “one of the finest interior decorators in Sweet Valley”. I love when Jess does stuff like this. Elizabeth would be useless, and just roll over like a dog. The man is impressed. The twins try to find cheap stuff, but it’s impossible to find everything they need for under $300 (they should check out Ikea, I would have thought Alice would be a fan what with her Swedish roots and all).

Alice sleeps late again (I guess it’s the next day? This must have started on, like, a Thursday, because it’s still only Saturday. Love that crazy Sweet Valley time-world). Alice asks Ned what they should do today and he’s all “Maybe you can do nothing and be a kid, but I have stuff to do! Adult stuff! Have fun, though. You should relish this opportunity”. Er, yeah…whatever. It’s not like Alice and the twins have switched bodies, they’re just pretending to be each other. I have a hard time believing an adult would feel relieved of their professional responsibilities just because their twelve-year-old daughters have taken over their job for two days.

The VCR hasn’t worked for Alice. She somehow broke it. She sends Ned to get it repaired. Then she has a brainwave and watches one of Jessica’s already-taped Days of Turmoil videos. She thinks to herself how genius she is. Alice seems a lot more like Jessica as a kid than Elizabeth.

The girls worry about Mrs. Wolsky’s porch and decide that, since Alice has been having so much trouble being a kid, they should switch back. They get home and beg their mom to switch back with them, but Alice just acts all self-satisfied and sasses back, “Sorry girls…when you’re an adult, you cant expect that people will bail you out every time something goes wrong. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a media class project to finish”. Harsh! I don’t get that, the twins apologize and are obviously stumped on how to do her work, and Mrs. Wakefield still won’t let up? BAD, BAD PARENTING!

The twins worry that they or Mrs. Wakefield will be sent to jail for not completing the design work. Bless them. (Sorry I keep saying “the twins”; it’s just that there’s little differentiation between the two in this book. Elizabeth is more devious than usual, and Jessica is more conscious of things like consequences and responsibility) Jess schemes that they should buy burgers from the Dairi Burger (continuity to SVH!) and pass them off as their own cooking for dinner (they’ll disguise them by loading them up with fresh tomatoes and their own sauces). That totally reminds me of 22 Short Films About Springfield. Mmm, steamed clams!)

Everyone compliments the twins that the burgers are “almost” as good as the Dairi Burger’s (heh). But then Steven finds one of the discarded wrappers. The twins are sprung. Pwned!

Jess gets a brainwave (I love how Jessica thinks of all the good ideas in this book) about Mrs. Wolsky’s sunporch. They should just take their own house’s sunporch furniture over there! …This is the first I’ve ever heard of the Wakefields having a sunporch.

Mrs. Wakefield wakes up on Sunday to another sugar donut breakfast. She realizes she doesn’t like sugar donuts very much. She wants to make herself an omelet, but Jessica won’t let her as “kids can’t be trusted to do that”. That’s right, get some of your own back, Jess.

Mrs. Wakefield asks to borrow Steven’s rollerblades for the blade-a-thon. She’s worried at the notion of rollerblading. Steve offers to give her some pointers, on the condition that Alice let him film her as she is learning to blade. Way to milk it, Steve.

Mrs. Wakefield, predictably, sucks at rollerblading. She tells Steve that he is not a very good teacher, to which he responds she is not a very good student. Lol.

Mrs. Wakefield, defeated, goes to the twins and asks to change back. But they aren’t having a bar of it, and tell her no.

Mrs. Wakefield goes off to meet her doom at the Rollerblade-a-thon  (she tells the twins to remember to water the plants and take some cooking lessons if she never comes back). The twins take this time to move the sunporch furniture to Mrs. Wolsky’s house. Steven catches them. He threatens to tell Mr. & Mrs. Wakefield, and to pay him off, the twins agree to let him film them moving the furniture dressed all in black, as if they are committing a robbery.

A neighbour hears of this and calls Ned Wakefield. He’s all worried, but the twins manage to convince him that there aren't really any robbers skulking around.

Jessica (again with the Jessica-initiated action!) finds a collage on the top of the fridge, made by Alice. It’s a bunch of pics of them all together, with quotes like “A daughter’s a daughter all her life”, and acrostic poems spelling out Jessica and Elizabeth’s names (is this where Elizabeth inherited her bad writing skillz from?). The twins are touched. Ned tells them Alice was planning to give that to them on the night of the Mother-Daughter picnic, but, well, we know what happened there. Jessica and Elizabeth rush to save Alice at the Rollerblade-a-thon, but for some reason invite everyone back to their house instead. Alice huffs and puffs, red-faced, exhausted, with a rip in her pants (oh noes!). Then she gets back home and…surprise! When Mrs. Wakefield comes in, the twins have prepared a special Mothers Day barbeque party for her, and invited everyone from the previous BBQ. They even remembered the charcoal! And cutlery (um…when’d they have the time for this? Oh, right, SV time warp…never mind). You’ll all be glad to know the Unicorns are finally satisfied with the lemonade: “I wanted to tell you personally,” Ellen Riteman said, “This lemonade is excellent - and just enough ice, too.”

Mrs. Wakefield admits she found it harder to be a kid than an adult. She says she is proud of the twins (aw). Then Mrs. Wolsky rings Alice up and is “tremendously impressed” with the job ‘Mrs. Wakefield’ did, and says she intends to recommend her to all her friends.

The last chapter shows Mrs. Wakefield admitting that she had backup furniture planned for the Mrs. Wolsky job (phew). She had it delivered to the garage, where the twins wouldn’t see. It ends up on the Wakefield’s sunporch. And everyone watches Steven’s evil videos and has a good laugh, and Alice hits him with a pillow when she sees how he filmed the way she “collected pledges”. Then the next book (“Steven Gets Even” gets set up).

The End!