Reluctantly Alice (15 page)

“Al, what in the world did that pork chop ever do to
you?” Les said at dinner. “You don't have to mutilate it.” Dad was working late, and Lester and I had actually made a gourmet meal for just the two of us: pork chops and applesauce. “What's wrong?”

“Denise Whitlock.”

“Denise Mack-Truck Whitlock?”

“That's the one.” I told him all the things she'd done lately.

“It's time to get tough, Al. Cream her.”

“You're kidding.”

“Just haul off and let her have it.”

“I'd get called to the principal's office.”

“Go! Make a splash! Cause an uproar!”

I thought about it as I finished my meat. Would that be enough? I wondered. Even if I told the principal everything Denise had done to me and he punished her, too, even if her friends didn't pile up on me after school, she'd still go on hating my guts.

Lester went out later, so I decided to call Aunt Sally long distance. This was a big enough problem to see if she had any suggestions.

“Alice, dear, how are you?” she asked as soon as she heard my voice.

“Not so good,” I answered. “Aunt Sally, what do you
do when there's this girl who hates you?” And I told her a few things about Denise.

“Well, dear, it's difficult, I know, but I firmly believe that there's a soft spot in that girl, and if you can find it, you'll win her over.”

I imagined probing Denise in the back during Language Arts, looking for her soft spot. I imagined Denise turning around and pasting me in the mouth.

“Here's what you do,” said Aunt Sally. “You give a little Christmas party for some of your friends and invite Denise.”

My stomach turned. “She wouldn't come,” I said.

“Tell her there's a special present under your tree just for her. No girl can refuse a present.”

“What if she still wouldn't come?”

“Tell her your big brother will be there and wants to meet her. Girls always like to meet their friends' brothers.”

I almost choked. “They've already met,” I said plaintively, and told her about Seventh-Grade Sing Day.

“Oh, my, this
is
serious!” said Aunt Sally. “What you've got to do, then, is write her a letter and tell her how much you want to be her friend.”

“But I
don't
!” I bleated. “I just want her to leave me alone.”

“Write her a letter,” Aunt Sally insisted, “and enclose a friendship ring. Tell her you bought it just for her.”

I tried to imagine writing a letter like that to Denise. I imagined Denise going to school the next day and telling everyone that I had proposed. I imagined her wearing the ring in her ear. Her nose. Pinning my letter up on the bulletin board outside the cafeteria. I wondered if when my mom and Aunt Sally were girls, Aunt Sally had given Mom the same stupid advice she gave me. I wondered why I kept calling Aunt Sally in the first place.

I thanked her for her suggestion, said yes, we were all eating vegetables now and then, and no, Dad wasn't engaged or anything, and then I said good-bye and hung up. I decided that Dad had been right all along. This was a problem no one else could solve but me. I had to figure out how to deal with Denise all by myself.

When Dad came home later, he looked sort of down-in-the-mouth, sad and discouraged, and it occurred to me that Helen Lake had promised to visit him in November, and here it was December and she hadn't come. I couldn't believe I'd been so selfish that I hadn't even thought about Dad's problems. Only mine.

I heated up his dinner for him and then sat across the table while he ate.

“When's Helen Lake coming to visit, Dad?” I asked. Tactful, that's me.

“She isn't,” he said. “I had a letter from her a few days ago.”

I waited. Something
was
wrong, then. “She's not coming at all? Ever?”

Dad smiled just a little. “Well, ‘ever' is a long time. Let's just say she's not coming any time soon.”

“Oh,” I said.

And when Dad realized I wasn't going to get up and walk away, he said, “It's like this, Al. Helen Lake and Janice Sherman have been friends for a long time—longer than I've known either one of them. And Helen realized that if I were to become serious about her, it would hurt their friendship. So she's opted to stay friends with Janice.”

“You mean she chickened out,” I said. “You mean she lost her chance to get married to the greatest man she'll ever meet.”

“Hey, wait a minute! Who's talking marriage?” Dad grinned. “But I appreciate the compliment.”

I wanted to make December really special for Dad after that, and when Monday of the second week came around, I decided to concentrate only on Christmas. Loretta Jenkins had holiday decorations up in the Gift Shoppe at the
Melody Inn, we already had a light snow, I was getting along with all my teachers, and we were playing basketball in P.E. It was a time for gifts and music and evergreen and being nice to everybody. Mr. Hensley even wore a tie to class that day with microscopic bits of red in it.

I especially liked my Language Arts class because Miss Summers, with her blue-green eyes, made me forget about the fact that Denise was in it. Watching my teacher move about the front of the room, listening to her read in her velvety voice, I remembered how desperately I'd wanted to be in beautiful Miss Cole's room back in sixth grade, and how disappointed I was that I'd gotten Mrs. Plotkin instead. And now I wondered what Mrs. Plotkin was doing this Christmas and decided I'd send her a card. I was feeling kind toward the whole human race. That's what Christmas does for you, see. One thing leads to another. One minute I was listening to Miss Summers read
The Lady and the Tiger
, and the next I was thinking about my sixth-grade teacher.

Everybody, I guess, gets a little mellow around Christmas. Dad and Lester and I aren't real big on shopping, though. At Christmas we usually think of what we're going to do together instead of what we're going to give each other, so I wasn't surprised when Dad said that evening,
“I've got three tickets for the Messiah Sing-Along. You two want to go?”

“Sure, why not?” said Lester.

“Al?”

“Yeah, I'll go,” I said.

We've been going to Messiah Sing-Alongs as far back as I can remember, even in Chicago. If you're going to be one of the singers instead of the audience, you come early and practice a little. There's an orchestra and paid singers for the solo parts, but the public is invited to be part of the chorus.

Because Dad started taking me with him when I was small, I've always stood next to him, even though I don't sing. Dad's a tenor, and tenors stand next to altos, and he always manages to stand just at the edge of the tenors so I blend in with the women and don't look weird or anything. I think Dad lets me sit with the singers in hopes that all this music around me will cure my tone deafness, and of course it doesn't, but I like being in the middle of all that noise. I especially love it when everyone stands to sing the Hallelujah Chorus. I just hum through the other parts, and in the “Hallelujah,” everyone sings so loud that what I do doesn't matter. I sound just fine to me.

What I also like about December are the carols. Dad
brings home new CDs of Christmas music, so I can hear my favorite carols in a dozen different styles. “The Cherry Tree Carol” is one of my favorites—how Mary's engaged to Joseph, and she tells him she's pregnant by someone else. Wow! What a shocker! We've got two versions of that. In the first one, Mary asks Joseph to pick some cherries for her, but he gets mad and says the father of her baby can do it. Then the cherry tree bows low so Mary can pick them herself, and Joseph just stands around. In the second version, Joseph apologizes to Mary because he knows she's going to be the Mother of Jesus.

The next evening I'd just finished listening to the second version when Lester came home from the library.

“Lester,” I said, “if you were engaged to Marilyn and she told you she was pregnant by someone else, what would you do?”

Lester hung up his jacket. “Is this a trick question?”

“Just checking,” I told him.

The rest of the week was a week of taking chances, and it all happened in Miss Summers's classroom. We had already done folktales, fables, and legends, and were finishing up a unit on the short story. Miss Summers mentioned that next semester we'd be reading biographies, autobiographies, and novels, and some of the class groaned.

She pushed her papers aside and came around to sit on the edge of her desk, the way she does when she has something important to say.

“I know that some of you think you don't like to read full-length books, but maybe, just maybe, you're in for a surprise,” she said in her low voice. Her voice and her skin and her coral-colored sweater all seemed made out of the same soft stuff.

“I used to feel that way about music,” she told us. “Classical music, I mean—music by Mozart and Brahms and Beethoven.” She made a little face, and the tiny frown lines made pink creases in her forehead. “It just sounded like noise to me—all those violins and horns twanging and blaring at once. But I knew there must be something to it because so many people love it. I made up my mind that every day for a week, when I was preparing my dinner at night, I would play Mozart's Fortieth Symphony. It wouldn't be like an assignment. I didn't have to listen closely or anything. Just play the music. By the third evening I was beginning to hear melodies that were familiar. I realized I was listening for certain passages, and it was then I discovered just how full and rich and wonderful that kind of music can be. Every time I hear it again, there are surprises—things I hadn't caught before, and I'm always sorry when it's over.”

She smiled at the class. “That's the way it is with books.
Good
books—full and rich and deep. And that's what I want you to discover. If you're in my class next semester, we're not going to worry so much about grammar. Don't even think about how you're going to sound when you read reports to the class. All I want you to do is enjoy. I want you to discover the
pleasure
of reading.”

I was so glad I was scheduled for Miss Summers's class next semester, I wanted to stand up and shout. For once in my life things were going my way.

And suddenly I wasn't thinking about books or school or Denise or even Christmas. I was thinking about Miss Summers cooking dinner all by herself, loving Mozart and Brahms and Beethoven, and when the bell rang at the end of class, I found my feet walking up to her desk, my face stretching into a smile, and my lips saying:

“Miss Summers, my dad and I wondered if you'd like to go with us to the Messiah Sing-Along on December twenty-second.” I couldn't believe it myself.

Miss Summers looked at me with her blue-green eyes, sort of puzzled. “You and . . . your
father
, Alice?”

“Yes. He'd really like it if you could come. He's manager of the Melody Inn, and he likes Mozart, too.”

“Over on Georgia Avenue? Why, that's where I buy my music!” she said.

I smiled even broader. “So could you come?”

“I sing alto and would be absolutely delighted,” she said.

I grinned. “We'll let you know later about the time and everything.”

“Thank you very much, Alice,” she said. “I look forward to it.”

“Me too,” I said.

I went out in the hall, leaned against the trophy case, and let out my breath.

What I had to do quick was get another ticket to the sing-along. As soon as I got home, I found the tickets on Dad's dresser and called the phone number on the envelope.

“I'm so sorry,” the woman said, “but we're sold out. We sold out even earlier than last year.”

“Even altos?” I asked.

“Especially altos,” the woman told me.

I felt my heart slide right down to my toes. Then I had another idea. Since Dad had signed me up as an alto and I don't sing at all, Miss Summers could use my ticket and I could use Lester's. One nonsinging alto certainly equaled one nonsinging tenor.

When Lester came home later I said, “Les do you
really
want to go to the Messiah Sing-Along?”

“Yeah,” said Lester. “It sort of grabs me.”

“Even if you got invited someplace with Marilyn or Crystal?” I thought maybe I could work something out with one of them.

“Yeah, I'd still go to the sing-along because I know it means a lot to Dad,” Lester said. “He's sort of lonely right now, you know.”

I lay down on the rug and pretended I was dead. The only possible way out of the mess was to get sick the day of the sing-along and tell Dad that I'd invited Miss Summers to go in my place. Strep throat. Stomach flu. Appendicitis. I'd think of something.

What I thought of, actually, was that I hardly knew a thing about Miss Summers except that her eyes were blue-green and I liked her. Maybe she already had a boyfriend. Maybe he was a wrestler.

But that was only the first impulsive thing I did that week. When I got to Language Arts the next day, Denise not only jabbed me as I went to sharpen my pencil but left a pen mark on my jeans. I think if I had been in anyone's class but Miss Summers's, I might have hauled off and let her have it, like Lester said. But I didn't especially want to
be sitting in the principal's office so close to Christmas, and I certainly didn't want to embarrass myself in front of my teacher.

Miss Summers, in a green knit dress, faced the class and said that we had just one more project to do before Christmas vacation.

“In preparation for the unit on biography next semester,” she told us, “I want you to get some understanding of what's involved in writing about another person's life—what's important, what's not, and what circumstances and events help shape us. To give you some firsthand experience, I want each of you to do an interview of your own.”