Alice At The Home Front (8 page)

“Why hello, Alice. Yes, uh, I’m quite well, thank you. I haven’t eaten baby food for quite some time, you know.” She smiled. “And I haven’t been sick, now that you mention it. Luckily, with the flu going around.”

A gust of wind almost carried off Mrs. Brownell’s felt hat, but she caught it in time and placed it snugly where it belonged.

“Have you had any news from Jimmy?” Alice wasn’t going to wait around talking empty talk.

“Ye-e-es. Did you know he was away? In Atlanta for the training. He’s doing very well, he says. Be back in a week or so. He told me you’d had a chat down at the drugstore.”

“In a week or so?”

“Yes.”

“I’m very interested in what he’s doing—in the CAP work.”

“Hmm. I’m not so happy about that. It’s dangerous work, you know, Alice.” She tugged at her hat.

“I know! Isn’t it wonderful?” Alice said enviously. “A great opportunity!”

Mrs. Brownell raised her eyes heavenward. “Everyone seems to think so except me. I call it a dangerous opportunity.”

“Well, good-bye now.” Alice extended her hand and did a little curtsey, thereby sending Mrs. Brownell on her way, having gotten the information she had been looking for. “Oh,” she called after her. “Could you tell him to see me when he comes back?”

Mrs. Brownell stopped and turned around, looking slightly surprised. “I will,” she said.

As Mrs. Brownell walked off, Alice noticed a dark figure following her down the street. It looked like a woman dressed in a black raincoat. That was strange; there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Why was she following Mrs. Brownell? Mrs. Brownell turned the corner, and so did the woman.
There could only be one answer to that
, thought Alice.
She must be a spy!
Alice figured the woman must be trying to find out where Jimmy’s base was located. Maybe she wanted to kidnap Mrs. Brownell and force her to tell. Alice went home wondering if she should do anything about this but decided to put it off. Mother would only say what she always said: “Mind your own business.”

The days dragged by, and Jimmy hadn’t returned. Except for plane sighting and the folding of bandages, which she could do almost without thinking now, she had only schoolwork to occupy herself with. She forced herself to finish most of it every night, promising herself a cookie (only one!) afterward. When she didn’t finish, visions of Woolworth hankies lined up before her like little packages from hell.

Alice proudly wore her bracelet to school Monday morning, and one of the girls said, “Ugh! You’ve got bugs on your wrist.”

“They’re scarabs, stupid,” Alice snapped back. “All the way from Egypt.”

“Well they look like bugs. All the way from Rhode Island.”

“You’re a bug. And a real ugly one. Plus, you don’t know what a scarab is, dumbbell.”

Laughter broke out in the classroom.

“Alice!” The teacher had overheard her. “Would you like to go see Miss Prichard?”

“Yes, please!” answered Alice. “She’s a good friend of mine.” She turned and grinned at the class.

A couple of the girls laughed louder.

“Do not be sassy, Alice,” her teacher admonished.

Some of the kids laughed again. Alice wasn’t sure whether it was with her or against her. “Grunty,” she said under her breath. Fortunately, no one heard her.

At recess, most of the girls carried around playing cards in boxes. They would find a place in the schoolyard sheltered from the wind and trade them whenever they weren’t in class. Everybody had playing cards except Alice. Some were plain bicycle cards; some were very fancy: hunting scenes or copies of famous paintings from the museum. The girls themselves decided which ones were the most valuable. A fancy painting was worth three bunnies and a bouquet of flowers.

Silvia, for instance, always had the very fanciest of all. Her parents bought the most elegant packs of cards and would play bridge by candlelight during the dimming, which was not allowed.

Once in a while Alice, in a wistful mood, regretted not joining the other girls. She would walk by and say, “Anybody want to trade a Lockheed B-25 for a Grumman?” They’d look at her and at each other and shake their heads.

One of Alice’s teachers—the one who had asked if she wanted to see Miss Prichard—called her over during recess the following day.

“I’ve thought of an excellent project for you. A little task in order to remind you not to show off to people,” she said. “Just come over to the library—you like the library, don’t you, Alice?

“It depends.”

They went in and sat down, Alice with one eye on the wall clock behind the teacher’s head. This was going to take all day.

“Even though you were rude to Deborah, which was wrong, you were right in frowning when she didn’t know what a scarab was.”

“I didn’t frown. I called her a dumbbell.”

“Yes, well that was rude. Now, since you know what a scarab is and have a bracelet of them, I’d like you to do a little research and present the class with a paper on the subject.”

“How?”

“My name is Miss Higgenbottom, Alice. Remember?

“How, Miss Higgenbottom?”

The big hand was way past the six. They’d been sitting there ten minutes already. Alice could think of a dozen things to do in ten minutes: feed Bagheera, look for the missing plane card, hide Suzie’s dolls in the washer …

“Let me introduce you to the encyclopedia index, in case you’ve never used it.”

Alice sighed. Not the encyclopedia. It took hours to look something up and even longer to read about it.

“This’ll take forever,” Alice moaned as she opened her binder. A torn sheet of Chinese characters fell out along with the drawing of a shark-mouthed Curtiss. Alice stuffed them back in.

“That’s the beauty of it, Alice. You’re a bright girl, and you secretly like difficult words and long sentences, don’t you? You can start right now. And let’s not copy. We teachers know all about copying, you know.” She pinched Alice’s arm slightly on the way out.

Looking up
scarabs
in the index of the encyclopedia wasn’t so bad, but finding the
S
volume was a nuisance. Alice didn’t want to bother, so she asked the librarian to help her.

The librarian said laughingly, “Next time, why don’t you just memorize the alphabet? You know, A B C D E F G,” she sang.

Behind her back, Alice stuck out the tip of her tongue.

She sighed, took up the heavy book, leafed through, and found some interesting words:
scab
, what you pick when you’ve skinned your knee;
scaffold
, what you hang murderers from;
scalpel
, what the doctor uses to cut you up;
scandal
, what you create when you do bad things (like write in chalk on the pavement). There it was:
scarab
, with a photo that looked just like the ones promenading around her wrist.

She began reading and taking notes on the back of her binder paper where she’d drawn the nine pen and ink chi symbols.

It was five o’clock by the time she had finished and packed up her things. She was nearing home when she heard a terrific racket. It was coming from in front of her house! Amid the screeching and barking, she saw Bagheera confronting a hefty German shepherd who must have escaped his owner. The huge dog was bouncing around wagging his tail, clearly wanting to play. Bagheera, on the other hand, was stretched up on his hind legs and boxing the dog’s snout with both paws, sharp claws extended, and spitting at the mutt like a garden sprinkler. With each scratch, the dog would whine and back away.

“Call off your cat!” boomed the owner who came stomping up. “You should get a leash for that crazy wildcat. He’s dangerous!”

“Where’s your dog’s leash?” replied Alice.

“Here, Aloysius, poor little doggy-woggy,” the man called to the panting eighty-pounder.

Bagheera, meanwhile, had hopped up on a parked car and was calmly licking himself, lamb-chop style.

Alice gathered him up and carried him inside. “I told you not to go out. You might hurt somebody,” she giggled.

Chapter Ten
 

At the Corner Drugstore
 

Was that wing curved or squared at the tip? Alice squinted as she peered through her grandmother’s mother-of-pearl binoculars and then looked down at the cards. It didn’t mean that she could always see clearly to identify the plane, if the cloud cover was too low and blotted it out or if wispy mares’ tails got in the way. But she could tell for sure it wasn’t an enemy plane, with the big, black insignia on the wings. Alice checked her watch, sighted the plane again, and wrote in her logbook: “Thurs 12 1700 Lockheed P40 heading SSW Alt 200.”

Alice heard the phone ringing downstairs and then footsteps approaching the stairwell.

“It’s for you, Alice,” Mother called.

Alice’s heart did a little dance as she went down to answer. She picked up the receiver. Hearing Jimmy’s voice on the other end and seeing that Mother was still in the entry room, she pulled the neck of her sweater over the mouthpiece.

“Hi, Alice. How yer doing? It’s Jimmy.”

“Aie, soyrbaak? Owdiiigo?”

“What? I can’t hear you.”

Alice tried again, tucking the mouthpiece into her sleeve. “Owloongyer baakfr?”

Mother smiled and left the room.

“Jeez. You got a cold, or what?”

“No, Everything fine,” she said, uncovering the phone. “How’d it go?”

“Hah! That’s a long story. You wanted me to call you?”

Alice rolled her eyes. “Of course I wanted you to call. I want to hear all about it.”

“Well, gosh, I’m kinda busy, you know. The gang’s giving me a party tonight … Alice? But if you want, we could meet at the drugstore like last time?”

“When?”

“Say, tomorrow after your school? I don’t have many free days.”

Alice put a curse right then and there on the “gang” and the “your school.” She wanted to say how about right now? But didn’t.

“So you’ll come there tomorrow? Promise?”

“Yeah, okay, Alice. I promise. Boy, you drive a hard one.”

She had no idea what “drive a hard one” meant, probably boys’ talk for making things difficult.

In spite of finally talking with Jimmy and his calling her and promising to meet, Alice felt a little nudge of sadness inside. She was pretty good at getting what she wanted, but what if the other person didn’t feel the same way she did?

Downtown the next day, the warm sun had managed to sneak along some of the narrow streets, melting the old snow, polishing up the new, and giving everything around a preview of the coming spring.

When Alice got near the Rexall drugstore, she heard a terrible racket coming out of the wedged open door. A chorus of men were singing. “… the Lord and pass the ammunition. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, and we’ll all be free!”

When she stepped in, she came face-to-face—at least that’s what it seemed to her—with an enormous orange jukebox. It was winking and blinking and throbbing and pulsing a rainbow of mismatched colors while the music blasted on, until finally, at the end of the song, the whole thing came to a halt. Music and colors vanished, and there stood a big, ugly plastic box.

With the creature subdued, Alice went over and looked at the tabs with the names of songs and the big black records that flopped down one by one with each nickel inserted in the slot.
A fun thing
, thought Alice,
but “I don’t want that jive on my milk diet.”
She chose a booth far enough away so that she’d be able to hear Jimmy talk when he came.

As soon as she sat down, the door swung back and in shuffled a bunch of boys, one of whom was Jimmy. Another boy, called Moses, whom she’d seen at dancing school in the advanced class, was with him. Jimmy and Moses came over to the booth and sprawled themselves on the benches and then shoved over to make room for the other two standing at the jukebox. She hated the smell of French fries wafting over the tables.

“Hiya, Alice. See? I brought the party with me,” said Jimmy. “You know Moses, here, don’t you?”

Something inside Alice sank. She thought they’d be alone, not with his gang. But maybe … just maybe he wanted her to feel included.

“And here comes Bill in the moth-eaten jacket.”

“It’s a Pendleton, you jerk,” said Bill, plunking himself down beside him.

“And over there’s Cameron, who’s never seen a jukebox before.”

They all laughed.

“And may I present to you guys, Alice the spotter. And in case you’re too ignorant to know what that is, she spots planes—our planes and Jerries’ planes, if they’ve got the nerve to fly over here. She records them in her little black book that she swiped from me at the stationers.” He winked at her.

“Oh, yeah? A spotter,” said Bill. “I have an aunt who does that.”

“You mean you can recognize them from down below?” said Cameron.

“Very good, Cameroni. Ye get an A,” said Jimmy, climbing over Bill to go to the counter. Alice saw he was ordering for everybody.

“Okay, now, Alice,” said Bill, when Jimmy returned, “I’ve got a test for you. Listen carefully, now.”

With all the attention, Alice was feeling a little foolish and a little happy at the same time. “You drive a hard one,” she quoted.

“Ready?” He leaned close enough to touch noses. “Now, how does a Lockheed P38 look different from a Curtiss P40?”

Alice sat up straight. “Oh! That’s easy. A Lockheed P38 Lightning is a fork-tailed twin engine fighter. You can’t miss it, because of the double tails. But a Curtiss P40 Warhawk has an open shark’s mouth instead of a nose, with all the teeth showing in a big smile.”

Bill’s eyebrows shot up. “Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. She knows her stuff, all right.”

Cameron nodded slowly. “Uh hmmm,” thinking hard about what she’d said.

“Wow!” said Moses, surprised.

“Wow,” said Alice to herself, who was feeling too warm from the compliments.

Jimmy went to get the drinks, and the jukebox started up with

Hut sut Ralston on the riddle rah

And a brawla brawla suet,

Hut sut Ralson on the riddle rah