Reluctantly Alice (10 page)

I should have just dropped it right then, but I had to go and say, “It's not for school; it's for Elizabeth.”

“You're doing all this for Elizabeth?” Lester said. “Why
doesn't she look through her own magazines?” And the next thing I knew, Lester was reaching for one of the copies on top of the “best pictures” pile.

I threw myself bodily on the pile. “No!” I screamed. “Don't look.”

Lester stared down at me. Dad came in from the kitchen where he was making chili.

“What kind of project is this, Al?” Lester said, picking up a magazine from the “side view” pile instead, noticing the paper clip, and turning right to it. I wriggled under the table on my stomach and buried my head in my arms. “New Guinea?” Lester said after a minute. When I didn't answer, he picked up another magazine and found the paper clip. “Australia?” he asked, then reached for another. “The Amazon?” There was a long, long pause. “I'll be a son of a gun,” he said at last.

I didn't want him making fun of Elizabeth. Not after all we'd shared and confided and promised. I sat up so fast, I bumped my head on the table.

“She's never seen a naked man in her life, and I'm just trying to help!” I bellowed.

“Well, for crying out loud,” said Lester, and went on flipping through the magazines. Then he shook his head. “Elizabeth sure isn't going to learn very much this way.”

Suddenly I thought about those magazines that had pictures of naked women in them, the kind on sale in drugstores, and wondered if there were magazines with naked men in them. Lester should know.

“Lester,” I said. “Would you be willing to do a big, big favor for Elizabeth?”

Lester leaped up out of the chair. “Are you crazy? No way! You're
nuts
!”

“Oh, not that,” I said. “All I want you to do is buy a magazine with naked men in it so Elizabeth can see what they really look like without spears in the way.”

“Al,” Dad said. “You don't need those kinds of magazines, and we can certainly do better than
National Geographic
s.”

“We can?”

“Tomorrow after school,” he said. “Meet me at the Melody Inn. We've got a date.”

Every so often, Dad does that. Gets mysterious. I didn't say anything to Elizabeth and Pamela, but when I got to the Melody Inn after school the next day, Dad already had his suit coat on and came right out when he saw me.

“Where are we going?” I asked, grabbing his arm as we crossed Georgia Avenue. “Are we walking or driving?”

“Walking.”

“Will we be inside or outside?”

“Inside.”

“Do we pay or is it free?”

“Free.”

“Can we get something to eat while we're at it?”

“Afterward, maybe.”

I couldn't imagine. The YMCA locker room, perhaps? But when we turned up the walk of the Silver Spring Library, I skidded to a stop. “Oh, no!” I said. “I'm not going in there and asking for pictures of naked men. No way.”

“Relax,” said Dad. “You're a big girl now.”

I followed him in and over to the library catalog computer. “What do I look up?” I murmured. “‘Men, naked'?”

“How about ‘human body'?” said Dad.

I tried that, but got human biology instead, and there were a lot of listings under 612.6. I walked around the room until I found the shelves of 612 books, and then, while Dad read the
New York Times
, I sat down on the floor and looked at books on the human body. Books on sex, I discovered, were in the same section.

I was absolutely, positively amazed. Dad was right. I didn't have to buy magazines from the drugstore or look through four hundred copies of
National Geographic
. There were pictures, all right. I don't mean diagrams with
all the insides showing—the heart in blue and the lungs in red and the liver in green or yellow. These were drawings so real they were like photographs of everything you could possibly want to see, and things you didn't even know about yet. Skin and hair drawings of what boys look like when they are six, ten, fourteen, and twenty. There were even real photographs of a woman having a baby. Someday I'd show those to Elizabeth, but one thing at a time, I decided.

A librarian came by to get a book from the shelf, and she couldn't help but see what I was looking at; she didn't even blink. Like it was okay to be curious. I felt almost the way I did at the grade school the other day. Safe. Protected.

When I picked out four books for Elizabeth, the man at the checkout desk didn't stare at me or anything, either. He checked out my books on bodies as casually as if I were reading up on the Civil War or photosynthesis or how to build a bird feeder. I had to know if this was just an act or if librarians were always glad to have you read stuff. So just before we left the library, I went over to a woman at the reference desk and asked where I would find a list of nudist camps.

It wasn't just an act, it was real. “I think those would be listed under sunbathers in our directory of associations,”
she said, without batting an eye. She reached for a large book. “Let me check.”

“Oh, I don't need to know right now. I just wondered where to look,” I told her. “Thanks a lot.”

I smiled and she smiled, but what I didn't realize was that Dad was waiting for me by the door and heard everything I said.

“Al?” he said curiously as we went outside.

I grinned. “Relax,” I said. “I'm a big girl now.”

When I showed the books to Elizabeth later, she said she would be grateful forever. She didn't know, either, that you could find out anything at all at a library—
those
kinds of things, I mean.

Well, almost everything. I knew that libraries had books about friendship and novels about bullies, but there wasn't any book exactly titled
How to Get Along With Denise Whitlock
. There were some problems, I discovered in the days to come, that you had to work out for yourself.

 

JUNIOR HIGH SURE HAS A WAY OF MIXING
you up, tossing kids around like a giant blender. I didn't have any classes at all with Pamela. I had World Studies with Patrick, P.E. with Elizabeth, and Language Arts
and
P.E. with Denise Whitlock.

Why couldn't I have had no classes at all with Denise, and Language Arts and P.E. with Pamela? Was it pure luck, or did someone in the school office decide on each pupil individually, moving him or her about from square to square like a game of Monopoly?

Elizabeth said that everything that happens to us is part of God's plan for the universe. I said that God must
have a terrific sense of humor, but I still didn't know why I was the girl that Denise Whitlock most liked to kick around. I didn't think God could hate me that much. Except for Language Arts, where I sat right behind her, I tried to avoid Denise whenever I could. But she did everything possible to embarrass me in P.E.

Right at that particular moment, I couldn't see any way that P.E. would be helpful to me. I couldn't see the importance of school in general, if you want the truth. Not
my
classes, anyway. I used to think that math was one of the most useless subjects, because I had to figure out things like what was 17 percent of a gross of pencils, and I can guarantee that I will go my whole life never having to know the answer to that.

Then I wondered if World Studies wasn't even less helpful than math. Where would I ever go that I would be ashamed if I couldn't define Alexander II's Act of Emancipation of 1861? In Language Arts, would the world really end if I didn't know everything there was about predicates? I don't think Miss Summers liked predicates any more than I did. I always felt that her heart was in poetry or stories, and that she only taught us grammar because she had to. Home economics was probably the most useful subject except that I already
knew how to cook the things I like best and didn't care whether I ever learned to cook liver and Brussels sprouts or not.

“You're missing the point, Al,” Dad said when I complained to him about all my useless subjects. “You may not need to know what 17 percent of a gross is, but there will be plenty of times you'll need to know a certain percentage of something. You just need to learn how to apply these things to other problems, that's all.”

I didn't answer.

“Sometimes,” Dad went on, “when we're upset about one part of something—school, for example—we feel angry about it all.”

When I still didn't answer, he said, “So what's up?”

“P.E.,” I told him, slinging the plates into the cupboard like I was dealing cards. “When you were in junior high, Dad, can you remember what you had to do in P.E.?”

Dad finished wiping off the top of the stove. “Oh, baseball, basketball—maybe a little wrestling. Track.”

“Do you know what
we
have to learn this grading period?” I told him. “The ring swing, the rope climb, the wall kick, and the frog stand.”

“Oh,” said Dad. “Well, that explains it.”

The rings I liked fine, actually. You grabbed hold of a
ring hanging by a long rope from the ceiling, got a running start, and swung yourself over to the next ring, which was a little higher off the floor. Then you pumped your legs back and forth until you reached the next ring and the next, before you worked your way back down again. But useful? If I were ever in a jungle and had to cross a swamp with alligators in it, and there were grapevines handy, I suppose the ring swing would be good to know.

I could also understand having to know how to climb up to the ceiling and down again on a knotted rope in case I was ever on the tenth floor of a burning hotel and had to lower myself by bed sheets.

But the wall kick and the frog stand must have been thought up by some troll who lives in the school broom closet.

“The wall kick,” said the instructor, standing before us in shorts and T-shirt, “helps strengthen the thigh and calf muscles, and requires a certain agility that takes a bit of practice. But that's the name of the game, girls. Practice.” And then she demonstrated.

Standing twenty feet back from the cinderblock wall, the instructor charged like she was going to throw herself right through it, then leaped up against the wall with her left foot and, bringing her right foot over her left leg,
jumped down onto the mat again facing us, back to the wall. It looked so easy.

“What you're doing,” she said, “is using your left leg as a yardstick, and jumping over it.”

What we were doing, in case she didn't know, was the second stupidest thing we would ever be asked to do in P.E. all semester. The only use I could see for it was if we were running across a field at night and suddenly came to a barn. If we knew the wall kick, I guess, we could keep from crashing into it by leaping up on it with our left foot and turning ourselves around. But the first most stupid thing we had to do in P.E. in seventh grade was the frog stand, and I couldn't think of anything useful for that at all.

The hardest part was not laughing when the instructor demonstrated. She squatted down, knees poking out to the sides, arms between her knees, hands flat on the floor. Then she tilted her body forward, bracing her arms against the insides of her knees, until her feet were off the floor and her whole body was balanced on the palms of her hands. That would be useful, I suppose, if I were a frog in the process of laying eggs.

“Why can't they teach us something important, Dad?” I asked, following him into the living room. “Like how to
walk like a model or dance the mambo or something I'll want to know in high school?”

“I'd settle for teaching girls how to climb a ladder and clean out the gutters,” Dad said, trying a new song on the piano.

It was because Dad was playing the piano that he didn't hear the phone ring, so I answered it. It was Aunt Sally.

“Alice, dear, I've been so curious to know how things came out with that Sherman woman and the girl your father met at the beach,” she said.

I didn't want to go into the whole business of what happened, so I just said that Janice Sherman wasn't bothering Dad anymore and that Helen Lake would be coming to Washington soon to visit.

“That's wonderful!” said Aunt Sally. “So he's in love, then.”

“Well, sort of,” I told her. “I can't really say.” And then, because I had her on the phone, I asked, “Aunt Sally, what did you have to do in P.E. back in seventh grade?”

“What's P.E.?”

“Physical Education.”

“Oh,
gym
, you mean. Well, we had to wear heavy blue cotton dresses with short skirts and snaps down the front, and matching panties with tight elastic around the legs. I remember that,” she said. “They were perfectly dreadful.”

I could imagine. “But what did you have to
do
?”

There was silence. “You know, Alice,” Aunt Sally said. “All I actually remember about gym class is that a woman was hired to play the piano while we did our exercises. We had an instructor who believed that if we did anything more strenuous than that, our wombs would drop or something. So we ran around in huge circles flapping our arms in time to the music—‘
Leap
, run, run. . . .
Leap
, run, run.' That was even worse than the gym suits.”

I agreed.

“Mostly,” said Aunt Sally, “I spent my seventh grade in mortal terror because there was a rumor that sometime during the year, the eighth-grade boys descended on the seventh-grade girls' dressing room and nobody could stop them. They'd go on a rampage, stealing bras and panties and things, and we were always afraid they were going to come roaring through while we were naked. They never did.”

I stood listening with my mouth half open. Way back in Aunt Sally's time, then—when Moses was alive, practically—there were initiations, ceremonies, that scared you to death.