The Wednesday Wars

All through September Wednesdays and into October, Mrs. Baker tasks Holling with washing chalkboards, pounding erasers, and straightening the room while his classmates leave for either Temple Beth-El (the Jewish temple) or Saint Adelbert’s (the Catholic church). He even cleans the Coat Room but doesn’t touch Doug Swieteck’s stash of collected items for his next teacher prank. Holling doesn’t complain for the sake of his father’s architect business, as Baker Sporting Emporium has yet to make its choice between Hoodhood and Associates and a competing firm, Kowalski and Associates.

One Wednesday, before the class leaves, Mrs. Baker asks Holling to retrieve trays of freshly baked cream puffs from the cafeteria. They are for the Wives of Vietnam Soldiers meeting at the church later in the day. The cream puffs send the class into a dither when they get back from recess, and as they leave for their church classes, they all threaten Holling: “If she gives you a cream puff after we leave, I’m going to kill you,” Danny Hupfer says (31).

This week, Holling’s assignment is to pound erasers from all the other teachers’ classrooms, and Mrs. Baker promises him a cream puff if he finishes in time. As he pounds, the chalk dust rises high in the sky and Holling realizes it’s headed toward the open classroom window where the cream puffs are sitting. By the time he runs upstairs, the chalk has settled on the cream puffs like “an extra-thick layer of powdered sugar on top” (34).

Unaware of the chalk dust situation, Mrs. Baker allows Holling to choose a cream puff. Knowing it’s ruined, Holling tosses the puff into the Coat Room while helping Mrs. Baker take the trays to her car. The next day, the whole town talks about the cream puff disaster at the Wives of Vietnam Soldiers meeting—everyone almost choked to death on the chalk dust. Meanwhile, Holling’s classmates threaten him after finding out he was given a cream puff, saying he now owes them all cream puffs. Holling finds himself in a bind as paying for enough cream puffs for his class will take three weeks’ worth of his allowance.

On the following Wednesday, Mrs. Baker gives Holling the task of cleaning out the cage of the class pets: Sycorax and Caliban, two rats. The rats were a gift from her husband, Lieutenant Baker, and grew to gargantuan proportions. While Holling tries to get the rats back into the cage after cleaning, they escape and run into the walls. At this point, Mrs. Baker changes their Wednesday afternoon routines by assigning Holling a Shakespeare play to read: The Merchant of Venice. Even though he thinks this is her way of punishing him for the cream puffs, Holling ends up enjoying the play with its action, speeches, and misunderstood villain, Shylock, whom Holling analyzes as “[s]omeone who wants to become who he’s supposed to be” (48).