Reluctantly Alice (19 page)

“Marilyn doesn't want a ring yet,” Lester explained, “but she wants to be ‘engaged to be engaged.' Crystal would marry me tomorrow, but I don't think I want a girl who's all that eager.”

I didn't understand any more than I did before. Lester, though, wasn't as upset as I thought he'd be.

“I don't know,” he told Dad. “Maybe I'll just hang loose and not go out with either one of them for a while. It'll be good to hang out with the guys for a change. Women are too complicated.”

“Sometimes,” said Dad.

About six o'clock, our relatives in Tennessee called to see how all us folks in “Silver Sprangs” were doing. Then
we called Aunt Sally to wish her and Uncle Milt and Carol a merry Christmas, and then we realized we didn't have anything good to eat in the house.

“Want to go out for dinner?” Dad asked us. “Your choice.”

“Let's eat Mexican,” Les said.

The restaurant's only a few blocks away, so we decided to walk it. We put on our coats and found snow flurries in the air again when we got outside. Not snow, just flurries. That's mostly the way it is in Maryland.

It was cold enough to see our breath, though, and I grabbed hold of Dad's arm on one side and Lester's on the other, and sort of hopped to get in step with them, and then we headed over to Georgia Avenue.

None of us knew what was going to happen next—whether Miss Summers would ever fall in love with Dad, whether both Marilyn and Crystal would give up on Lester, or whether I would really go the rest of seventh grade without making an enemy. But we were a family, and for right now, that was enough.

“The Three Musketeers, that's us,” I said, beaming. Somebody was whistling again, I noticed, and it was Dad.

 

Find out what happens
next for Alice in

 

WHAT I'VE DECIDED ABOUT LIFE IS THIS:
If you don't have a mother, you need a sister. And if you don't have a sister, you need a bulletin board.

Elizabeth Price, across the street, has a room with twin beds, with white eyelet bedspreads on each, a little dressing table and stool, a lamp with a white eyelet ruffle for a shade, and a bulletin board covered with photos of Elizabeth in her ballet costume, her tap shoes and pants, her gymnastic leotards, and her Camp Fire Girl uniform, which isn't too surprising, since there's a huge photograph over the couch in their living room of Elizabeth in her First Communion dress.

Pamela Jones, down the next block, has pictures of movie stars and singers on hers. She also has a dried rose, which Mark Stedmeister gave her once; an autograph by Madonna; a pom-pom, which her cousin in New Jersey sent her; and a photograph of her and Mark, taken from behind, with their arms around each other and their hands in each other's hip pockets.

I'd seen those bulletin boards dozens of times when I stayed overnight at Pamela's or Elizabeth's, but suddenly, in the winter of seventh grade, I wanted one of my own more than anything else I could think of.

What I wanted was to know I was growing up normally—that I was in step with every female person in Montgomery County, that I was a part of the great sisterhood of women. I wanted to see the highlights of
my
life pinned up on the wall. I wanted to make sure I
had
a life.

“I'd like a bulletin board for my room,” I told Dad one night when he was cleaning the broiler. “Pamela and Elizabeth both have one, and I want a place where I can pin up things.”

“I've got an extra one at the store. I'll try to remember to bring it home,” he said.

I get a lot of weird things that way. Dad is manager of the Melody Inn, one of a chain of music stores, so he
can bring home whatever he wants. Usually it's stuff that's defective or doesn't sell; so far I've got two posters of Prince; one of Mozart; a couple of slightly warped drumsticks, which I gave to Patrick, who used to be my boyfriend; a Beethoven bikini from the Melody Inn Gift Shoppe, which says,
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BEETHOVEN
on the seat of the pants, only the print is crooked; and some notepads, with
CHOPIN LISZT
printed at the top.

The following afternoon, there was a huge bulletin board, a little dusty, with one corner chipped, hanging on the wall above my bureau.

“It's great!” I told Dad. “Aunt Sally used to have a bulletin board in her kitchen, didn't she? I remember she used to pin up pictures I drew in kindergarten.”

“That was your
mother
, Al.” (My name is Alice McKinley—Alice Kathleen McKinley, to be exact—but Dad and Lester call me Al.) “And those were pictures you'd made in nursery school. Don't you remember how your mother kept photos of you and Lester on it too?”

I always manage to do that. Mom died when I was five, and I always seem to mix her up with Aunt Sally, who took care of us for a while afterward.

“Yeah, I think I do,” I told Dad, but I wasn't really sure.

I set aside the whole evening to work on my bulletin
board, and took a box of keepsakes from my closet to see what was worth pinning up—something as wonderful as an autograph by Madonna or a photo of me in a ballet costume. Carefully I scooped things out of the box and spread them around on my bed.

There was an envelope, yellow around the edges. I looked inside: grass. A handful of dry grass. And then I remembered Donald Sheavers back in fourth grade, when we lived in Takoma Park. We were playing Tarzan out in the backyard, and we had a big piece of cardboard for a raft. At some point he was supposed to kiss me, but every time he tried, I got the giggles and rolled off. For a whole afternoon Donald tried to kiss me, and though I wanted him to, it was just too embarrassing. So after he went home, I pulled up a handful of grass from under the cardboard to remember him by.

Stuffing the grass back into the envelope, I picked up a tag off my first pair of Levi's. I'd been wearing Sears jeans through most of elementary, and when I got to sixth grade, Lester had taken me to buy some real Levi's. I studied the label now in my hand and tried to imagine Pamela and Elizabeth looking at it in admiration and awe. I put the label on top of the grass.

I couldn't figure out what the next thing was. When
I unrolled it, I saw that it was a piece of brown wrapping paper with leaves drawn on it. And then I remembered the sixth-grade play, where Pamela had the lead role—the part I'd wanted—and I had to be a bramble bush instead. I put the brown wrapping paper over by the Levi's label and the grass. It was very discouraging.

Then I felt that sort of thump in the chest you get when you come across something important, and I picked up an envelope with
ALICE M.
on the front, decorated with drawings of hearts, and airplanes with red stripes on the wings.

Inside was one of those misty-looking photographs of a man and woman walking through the woods holding hands, and you can't see their faces. At the top, in curly letters, were the words
A SPECIAL FEELING WHEN I THINK OF YOU.
There weren't any printed words when you opened it up, but someone had written in blue ink, “I like you a lot.” A valentine from Patrick from sixth grade! I decided I'd put the card up on my bulletin board but not the envelope. I could never explain the airplanes to Pamela and Elizabeth, because I couldn't understand them myself.

What was left in the box was the wrapper of a 3 Musketeers bar that Patrick had given me; the stub of a train ticket when I'd gone to Chicago to visit Aunt Sally; a ring from my favorite teacher, Mrs. Plotkin; a book of
matches from Patrick's country club; and a program from the Messiah Sing-Along that I had gone to last Christmas, with Dad and my Language Arts teacher.

This was it! This was my life! I turned the box upside down again and shook it hard to see if an autograph from Johnny Depp or something might fall out, but all I got was a dead moth.

I took thumbtacks and put up the valentine from Patrick, the train ticket stub, Mrs. Plotkin's ring tied to a ribbon, the matchbook, and the program from the Messiah. They hardly filled up one corner.

I clomped downstairs for the Ritz crackers, but Lester had them. He was sitting at the kitchen table over a copy of
Rolling Stone
.

Dad was drinking some ginger ale. “How's the bulletin board coming?” he asked.

“I think it's too big,” I mumbled, flopping down on a chair. “I haven't had enough great moments in my life, I guess.”

“Well, think about the ones you
have
had, and see if you can't come up with something,” he told me.

“My first bra, my first pair of Levi's,” I said. “I suppose I
could
put the labels up, but there's still three-fourths of the board yet to go.”

Lester put a squirt of Cheez Whiz on a cracker and popped it in his mouth. “You could hang your whole bra and jeans on the bulletin board and then you wouldn't have any space left at all,” he said.

I gave him a look. Lester's only twenty, but he's got a mustache, and girls go crazy over him. Don't ask me why, but they do. Right at that very moment he had a blob of Cheez Whiz in his mustache.

“Keep thinking,” I told him.

“Remember when Patrick took you to the country club?” Lester said. “When you got home, you discovered you'd stuffed one of their cloth napkins in your purse. That'd be good for a twelve-inch square of space.”

I was desperate. “I can't have Pamela and Elizabeth over just to see a label off my jeans and a train ticket! I've hardly got anything at all.” I threw back my head and wailed: “My life is a blank bulletin board!”

Lester put down his magazine. “Al,” he said, “what you do is you take off all your clothes, drag your bulletin board out in the street, and take an ax to it. By tomorrow morning, you'll have a policeman's jacket, a hospital ID bracelet, and a newspaper story to add to your collection. Maybe even a photograph of you in the policeman's jacket, climbing into the back of a paddy wagon. I guarantee it.”

I stomped back upstairs and sat glaring at the near-empty bulletin board. Chances were, in another year, I wouldn't even want some of the things that were up there now!

And then it came to me that I would probably have this bulletin board until I was through college. I was twelve, and if I graduated when I was twenty-one, that was nine more years. It wasn't as though my life was over. It was still being written, and the thing about bulletin boards—the
reason
for bulletin boards—was you could change things around. Add and subtract. Then I didn't feel so bad.

The phone rang. It was Pamela.

“Guess what?” she said breathlessly.

“You got a newer, bigger bulletin board,” I guessed.

“No. Mother said I can start wearing different earrings now, Alice! I don't have to go on wearing these little gold balls I've had since third grade. I can wear
hoops
if I want. Even French hooks! You want to go shopping with us this weekend?”

I knew right then I could not go another year, another month, another week even, without pierced ears. Whatever Pamela did, that's what I'd do. Whatever Elizabeth had, that's what I wanted. Always before, Dad and I smiled secretly at the kids who came in the music store all dressed
alike, all wearing black, all with an earring in one ear and the same kind of makeup. I'd think how stupid it was to try to be a copy of someone else.

But suddenly it was happening to me. I was turning into a lemming! If all the girls in junior high suddenly raced to the roof and plunged madly over the edge, I would be sailing off into space with them.