Matilda

Matilda’s home is very nice because her father, small and buck-toothed with a thin mustache, is good at selling used cars. Matilda asks him about his work, but he calls her an “ignorant little twit” (22) and instead explains to his son, Michael, that the secret to selling a car with worn gears is to add sawdust to the oil, which makes the car run smoothly—at least until the buyer gets home.

Matilda protests that this sawdust ruse is dishonest, but Mr. Wormwood says, “Customers are there to be diddled” (23). He also spins a used car’s speedometer cable backwards to reverse the mileage gauge and make the car seem newer. Matilda objects again, and both her father and mother tell her to shut up and finish her TV dinner.

Matilda knows she’s much smarter than they think she is, and she resents how they treat her. She decides to get a bit of revenge. 

Just before her father leaves for work, Matilda puts a line of superglue around the inside of his favorite porkpie hat. Mr. Wormwood puts on the hat, goes to work, and finds he can’t remove it. Back home that night, neither he nor Mrs. Wormwood can get the hat off without hurting him. He looks at Matilda suspiciously, but she gazes back with innocent eyes. He can’t shower, and he must sleep awkwardly with the hat on.

The next morning, his wife snips the hat off with scissors, which leaves a bald ring in his hair and bits of leather still glued to his forehead. At breakfast, Matilda suggests he work at those leather bits because “[p]eople will think you’ve got lice” (37). 

A week after the superglue incident, Mr. Wormwood returns from work in a foul mood. He finds Matilda reading in the living room. He grabs the book and demands to know what it is. Matilda says it’s The Red Pony by John Steinbeck, an American writer. He declares that American books are “filth” and that he’s tired of her reading all the time. He tears up the book and throws it in the trash. Horrified, Matilda says it’s a library book; her father tells her to save up to buy a replacement, and he storms out.

Matilda decides not to get sad but get even. Her friend Fred has a parrot who says, “Hullo, hullo, hullo” and “Rattle my bones!” (43). Matilda bribes Fred with pocket money to loan her the parrot. She manages to get the bird in its cage back to her house, where she stuffs it up the fireplace chimney. That evening at dinner, the parrot says, “Hullo, hullo!” and Mrs. Wormwood thinks it’s burglars in the dining room. She demands that her husband go check it out, but he’s scared and demands that they all accompany him. They grab weapons—a golf club, a knife, a fireplace poker—and tiptoe toward the dining room, Mr. Wormwood bringing up the rear.

Matilda dashes into the room brandishing her dinner knife, but there’s no one there. They hear, “Rattle my bones” (47), and Matilda says it’s a ghost. They all run away, terrified. The next day, Matilda returns the slightly sooty parrot, telling Fred that her parents loved it. 

Matilda’s parents, humbled by the ghostly parrot, are quieter for a week and civil to their daughter. The politeness ends when Mr. Wormwood, dressed in his ghastly green-and-orange check suit, sits in the living room with his son, teaching him how to calculate car-sales profit. He gives Michael the purchase price of each and the amount it later sold for, usually vastly more than it cost Mr. Wormwood. He tells his son to calculate the net profit.

Michael struggles with the numbers, but Matilda, sitting on the other side of the room, calls out the correct answer. Mr. Wormwood looks down at his account, sees that she’s right, and angrily accuses her of cheating. 

Every day, Mr. Wormwood rubs a dark lotion into his hair to keep it looking good. Early one morning, Matilda empties out most of the lotion and replaces it with her mother’s peroxide hair dye. The remaining lotion stains the peroxide to a dark color so that it looks normal in the bottle.

At breakfast, Mr. Wormwood bounds into the kitchen, all puffed up about how today he’ll fool customers into buying clunkers. Mrs. Wormwood brings in the breakfast platter, then screams and drops it when she sees her husband’s hair: It’s colored a dirty gray. She pulls out a mirror and shows him. He panics at his new look.

Mrs. Wormwood says he must have used her hair dye instead of his lotion. She warns him that so much peroxide might make his hair fall out. Matilda gently suggests he wash it quickly to reduce the damage. He orders his wife to call her hairdresser for an emergency appointment so he can have his hair dyed black.