Reluctantly Alice (5 page)

My stomach sank. “Where was it?” I asked weakly.

“Under my bedroom door this morning.”

Somebody, obviously, had either printed it in the night while I was asleep and slipped it under Lester's door, or done it before breakfast while the others were getting dressed. I read it again. If it had been written in script, I could have guessed, but this had me stumped.

“Pamela,” I said finally. “It's got to be Pamela.”

“Is she the one with the Lady Godiva hair who tried to crawl in bed with me at the beach cottage?”

“She just did it as a joke, Lester. She crawled right out again.”

“Well, I don't want little notes appearing under my door, okay? I've got Marilyn and Crystal to worry about without some skinny-legged twelve-year-old spying on me and leaving notes that somebody else might see. Which one was spying on me from your room last night?”

“Both of them,” I told him. “You now have four girls who would die for you, Lester. I can't understand it, but you do.”

Dad understood it. “You want to go to Mexico, Les? Just the two of us?”

Lester didn't know he was kidding. “
Mexico?
When?”

“Now. Tonight. Tomorrow. I don't care.”

Lester looked at Dad, then at me.

“He has
two
women who would die for him,” I explained.

“Oh,” said Lester.

At the bus stop on Monday, I said, “Your ‘hunk' didn't think it was funny, Pamela.”

“What?” said Pamela.

“That note under Lester's door. He wants you to stop
spying on him and slipping notes under his door. You'll just make him mad.”

“What are you
talking
about?” asked Pamela.

And then I noticed that Elizabeth's face was tomato-soup red again. I stared.

“You?”
I said. And when she didn't answer, I said, “Elizabeth, I never heard you use the word ‘hunk' in your life.”

“I figured that's what his girlfriends call him.”

I still couldn't believe it. Elizabeth, the nun-to-be, having a crush on Lester the Crude.

“Elizabeth,” I said earnestly, “he actually drinks ketchup right out of the bottle. He sweats. He belches. He does everything you hate. There isn't anyone in the world more unlike you than Lester.”

But even as I said it, I realized that Lester, in Elizabeth's eyes, would never grab a bra out of her hands and go racing around the playground with it the way Mark Stedmeister had done last summer. He would never give her an ID bracelet one week and then come back a couple weeks later to say he wanted to give it to someone else. To Pamela and Elizabeth, Lester was so far above the boys we'd been going with over the summer that he could do no wrong. I decided that the next time Lester was lifting
weights and the whole basement smelled like armpits, I'd invite the girls over to see what they were missing.

In the meantime, I began to think that the main problem with love was the number three: Lester, Marilyn, and Crystal; Dad, Janice Sherman, and Helen Lake; Lester, Pamela, and Elizabeth. . . .

I was glad I wasn't part of a triangle. I was glad I didn't have a crush on anyone. For nine actual minutes that morning, I was glad to be who I was: Alice McKinley. Until I got to school.

 

DAD SAYS THAT ALL MY SNEEZING AND
blowing is hay fever that I probably inherited from his mother—that sometimes things like that skip a generation. Maybe so, but I don't know why this one had to skip over Dad and land on me instead of Lester, or how it could be hay fever when there isn't a barn anywhere near our neighborhood.

Just standing on the corner waiting for the bus with Pamela and Elizabeth that morning seemed to set it off, and when Patrick got on and passed my seat, he stopped and said, “What's wrong?”

“Hay fever,” I told him, blowing my nose.

“Oh,” said Patrick, and went on.

“See?” said Elizabeth.

“See whad?” I asked, my head stuffy.

“If Patrick was twenty instead of twelve, he would have at least sympathized or something. He wouldn't just say, ‘Oh.'”

“The twenty-year-old in
my
house would have,” I told her. She and Pamela were really getting dopey about older men.

In Language Arts class, first period, I sat in the row at the back, and was glad because one pocket in my jeans kept getting slimmer as I took Kleenex out, and the other pocket kept getting fatter as I stuck the used tissues back in. I knew I was really irritating Denise, the girl who sat in front of me, because every time I blew my nose, she raised her shoulders and let out a low sigh.

Over the weekend we were to have made a family tree and to have listed the most important events in our lives up to that point.

“We'll be using these charts all semester, class,” Miss Summers told us. “You may want to use one of your relative as the main character in your own original folktale; you may want to choose an event in your own life as material for a short story; and we will be using these
charts as outlines when we study autobiography and biography later on.”

I wasn't listening as much as I was noticing how Miss Summers's blue-green eyes matched the color of her blouse. Then I realized she had asked us to hand our papers in, and I had just started to pass mine to Denise when I remembered we were to circle the name of anyone who was dead or absent.

“Wait a minute,” I said as my nose started running again, and, snatching my paper back, I circled the penciled box that said “Mother,” holding a Kleenex over my nose, while Denise watched impatiently.

“Oooh!” she said, taking my paper again. “Widdle Alwice don't have her a mama.” And laughed.

I didn't think much of it, because people say stupid things all the time. I took still another Kleenex and blew hard. When I got to P.E., though, I remembered something else I hadn't done. We were supposed to have freshly laundered shorts and T-shirts, and I'd forgotten to take mine home. In the lineup, the teacher told me that having clean clothes at inspection every two weeks would be part of my grade, and then I heard the large girl somewhere down the line say, “But Widdle Alwice don't have a mommy!” and some of the other girls giggled.

“Do you know anything about that girl over there?” I asked Elizabeth at lunch.

“Denise Whitlock?” Elizabeth said. “She's an eighth grader, but I heard she's repeating a couple courses this year.”

I noticed that Denise always sat with the same three girls in the cafeteria, all older than us, and they always seemed to be looking around, whispering about other people, and laughing. I decided to steer clear of Denise.

But in World Studies that afternoon, as we went in the door, Patrick said, “I heard you were crying in Language Arts this morning.”

I stared at him. “I
wasn't
!”

He just shrugged. “Somebody said you were crying because your mother's dead.”

“That's
dumb
, Patrick! I was blowing my nose because I have hay fever.”

“Oh,” said Patrick, and this time
I
wished he could think of a little more to say.

I took my seat in the first desk in the front row. Word Studies is one of the subjects where I get butterflies in the stomach, because I always know I'll be called on first.

Mr. Hensley was talking about Russia and its republics and was pacing back and forth in front of the room.
Not only did he have bad breath, I had discovered, but he spewed little droplets of saliva on the people in the first row. I was thinking how funny it would be if I came to school one day with an umbrella and held it over my head—how the other kids would laugh—when suddenly I saw Mr. Hensley stop in front of me.

“Alice, can you tell us in what ways Russia, before 1861, was similar to the United States before the Civil War?”

It's questions that come at me like Ping-Pong balls that unnerve me. My mind goes blank. I could feel my face turn red.

“Um . . . there were sections of the country that didn't agree with other sections of the country?” I said at last. I'm not stupid, but I'm not the brightest person in seventh grade, either.

Mr. Hensley smiled patiently. “Well, yes, but that's still the case, isn't it? There are more than one hundred and fifty national groups living in Russia, remember, each with its own language and customs. But why is the year 1861 important? Yes, Patrick?”

“Alexander II proclaimed freedom for the serfs,” said Patrick. “Before that they could be bought and sold, just like here.”

“Correct. Alexander II began his reign as a reformer.
What else was he responsible for?” Mr. Hensley asked. Patrick named all the accomplishments like the letters of the alphabet. I didn't relax until the bell rang and I knew I wouldn't be called on again.

At home, we try not to save up all our gripes and bring them up at the dinner table. “When I get home from work,” Dad always says, “I don't feel like eating problems.” But sometimes we find ourselves laying them out on the table anyway.

Lester started it by coming to dinner in a rotten mood and complaining because we were eating SpaghettiOs. Dad remarked that he was in a foul mood himself and wasn't up to anyone else's complaining, and Lester said that whatever Dad's problem was, it couldn't be worse than his own.

“Want to bet?” Dad said. “I've invited both Janice Sherman and Helen Lake to a concert this Saturday, but if what Alice tells me is true and Janice Sherman really does think she's in love with me, it's a crazy idea.”

“It's a crazy idea,” said Lester, biting into his garlic bread like he was attacking it. “Take it from me, Dad, it's a ridiculous idea. Marilyn told me last night I've got to choose between her and Crystal, and it's driving me nuts.”

“Hmmm,” said Dad in sympathy.

We ate in silence for a while, except for the occasional crunch of garlic bread.

“Well,” I said, trying to divert their attention. “In Language Arts, a girl teased me because Mom's dead.”

Dad looked up. “People don't tease about things like that, Al.”

“Yeah?” I said. “She did it again in gym.” I explained what happened, and added, “Now it's going around school that I was crying in class because I don't have a mother.”

“Anyone who would tease about that is just plain sick,” said Dad. “Ignore it.”

“How?” I asked. “I've never been good at pretending I'm deaf.”

“The next time she says something to you about Mom, just look at her and say, ‘Yeah? And your mother wears army boots,'” said Lester.

Sometimes Dad and Lester are
worse
than no help to me whatsoever.

“Of course,” Lester added, “Dad could always marry Janice or Helen, and then you'd have a mother, and that would shut her up.”

“Shut up, Lester,” said Dad.

As the evening went on, though, and after I'd found some cheesecake at the back of the refrigerator that Lester
had probably hidden from me, I began to feel a lot better. I began to feel, in fact, that Dad's and Lester's problems were a hundred times worse than mine. Lester would simply have to solve his himself, but Dad was in a real mess. Unlike Lester, he already knew for sure which woman he liked best, and it wasn't the one he had to work with every day, which really made things sticky. I decided to call Aunt Sally in Chicago and see what she had to suggest.

“Alice,” she said. “It's so good to hear from you. How's seventh grade?”

I'd already decided I wasn't going to tell her any of my problems, not when I was being charged by the minute, so I said that things were going great with me, but I was worried about Dad.

There was silence at the other end of the line—the kind of silence when you can still hear someone breathing.

“What's he done, Alice?” she said.

“
Nothing!
It's just that there are these two women . . .”

“
What
women?”

“Well, the assistant manager at his store, and then the one he met at the beach.”

“I
knew
it!” said Aunt Sally.

“What?”

“I knew he'd go crazy with grief after your mother died. All these years he's been so quiet. . . .”

“He's really okay, Aunt Sally. It's just that he likes this woman a lot, the one he met at the beach, but he's invited them both to a concert, and—”

“Why on earth would he do something like that?”

The thing about Aunt Sally is that to get her to listen, you have to shut her up. I finally explained how he's always thought of Janice Sherman as his business partner, while she always thought of him as . . . well, something more. I could just tell.

“And this girl he met on the beach?”

“
At
the beach,” I corrected. “She's not a girl, Aunt Sally, she's a lady. She owned the beach cottage next to ours.”

“Well, I'm
so
glad you called,” said my aunt. “This is the kind of thing that could get your father in serious trouble.”

“How?”

“If things go along the way they are, with that Sherman woman thinking he might marry her, he could get hit with a breach of promise suit.”

I had no idea it was so serious. I had no idea, either, what a breach of promise suit even was. But the way Aunt Sally made it sound, it was like bubonic plague or something.

“What's Janice Sherman like?” Aunt Sally asked.

I tried to describe Janice. I said she wasn't too short, not to tall, not too fat, not too thin. She was pretty but not exactly beautiful, and she loved music.

“Aha!” Aunt Sally seemed to be thinking. “Well, I don't know if Ben wants any suggestions from me, Alice, but I've got one.”