Reluctantly Alice (3 page)

“She knows I heard from Marilyn. She knows I'm thinking it over. But she thinks she still has a chance.”

“And she doesn't?” I studied my brother—the way his mustache sort of drooped at the corners. Lester's mustache makes him look a lot older than he is.

Lester shook his head. “It's Marilyn. I know it's Marilyn. I've never loved anyone in my life as much as Marilyn.”

“What if you give up Crystal and then Marilyn dumps you again?” I asked.

“I'll kill her,” said Lester.

Dad came in with the ice cream and a Pepperidge Farm chocolate layer cake. “You know what I think?” he said. “I think you're too young, too fast, and too far, Lester. You really ought to consider cooling it with both girls for six months or so, and see how you feel then.”

“Get real,” said Lester.

I wondered which girl I would like most to have for a sister-in-law. Marilyn plays the guitar; Crystal plays the clarinet. Marilyn is slender, with long brown hair. Crystal has short red hair and huge breasts. Both treat me really nice. If I was a bridesmaid for Marilyn, we'd probably be outdoors in a field, barefoot, in white cotton dresses. If I was a bridesmaid for Crystal, the wedding would be in a cathedral with music by Bach. I can't sing, but I know enough about music to know that if it's Crystal Harkins, the music will be Bach. I couldn't decide which girl to choose, either.

“Why don't you just let fate decide it?” I said, swishing some fudge ripple ice cream around in my mouth. “Whichever girl's birthday is nearest your own, marry her.”

“If you can't say something intelligent, Al, just shut up,” Lester told me, and I realized that Dad and I weren't any more help to him right then than he and Dad are to me sometimes. A lot of the time.
Most
of the time, in fact.
What I need most of all in my life is the one thing I haven't got: a mother.

If I'd had a mother when I sat on a jelly doughnut the first day of school, she would have known what to say when I told her about it. When I told Pamela and Elizabeth, they each said, “I'd simply die!” When I told Lester, he just laughed. When I told Dad, he got logical and asked what the doughnut was doing on the seat in the first place, and how it should have been on the table. It didn't
matter
why the doughnut was on the seat. What mattered was that it
was
, and I sat on it.

A mother, I think, would have listened and agreed that it was embarrassing, but not the end of the world. She would have come up with something snappy to say if that, or anything like it, ever happened again. And most of all, she would have explained how to wash jelly off the seat of my pants without making it look as though I'd wet my jeans.

If I had to sit on that jelly doughnut again or be Lester right now, I wasn't sure which I'd choose. In any case, the phone rang, so I went out in the hall to answer. It was Marilyn.

“Hi, Alice,” she said, and her voice was like wind chimes—tinkly, high, and sweet. I remembered how she'd come to dinner once in a long skirt and I'd wanted to be
like her so I went upstairs and put on a nightgown with a blouse over it and she hadn't even laughed. I really liked Marilyn and wondered if there was anything I could say that would help Lester.

“It's been a long time since I talked to you, Marilyn,” I said.

“I know. Too long. Much too long. Is Lester enjoying his birthday? I know he probably just got home, but I wondered if he'd opened my present yet.”

“He probably opened it in private,” I told her, then realized how dumb that sounded—as though her gift was probably so personal, he wouldn't have dared open it in front of the family. “I mean, Lester isn't real big on presents anymore. What I mean is . . .”

“It's okay, Alice,” Marilyn said quietly, but I thought she sounded hurt.

“No, what I
mean
is . . .”

“You don't have to explain.”

“He loves
you
best!” I blurted out.

There was silence at the other end of the line. “Best of
who
?” she asked finally. And suddenly I realized that while Crystal knew about Marilyn, Marilyn probably didn't know about Crystal.

“A-anybody,” I said. “Me or Dad or
anybody
!”

“Oh,” said Marilyn.

Lester came out of the kitchen. “Is that Marilyn?” he asked.

“Here's Lester!” I said quickly, and handed the phone to him.

I don't know how one person can get in as much trouble as I do. Things would have been okay, I guess, if Crystal hadn't called next. By then, Lester had the stereo going so loud, he didn't even hear the phone ring, so I got it on the upstairs extension just as I was eating graham crackers before bed.

“Hi, Alice,” Crystal said, and it sounded as though she'd been crying. “Did Lester have a nice birthday?”

“Yeah, a really great birthday,” I said, wishing that Les, not me, had answered. And when Crystal didn't say anything else, I added, “He got presents from Dad and me and you and . . . from Dad and me and you.”

I heard Crystal swallow.

“Do you want me to get Lester?” I asked.

“No,” Crystal said, and blew her nose. Now I knew for sure she was crying. “I—I just wondered if he'd opened my gift yet. I guess I thought he'd call.”

I couldn't stand the idea of Crystal crying. I was thinking about the time last summer I'd gotten a perm, and my
hair was all smelly and the curls were as tight as corkscrews. I was crying, and Crystal had come upstairs and made me beautiful. She'd shown me how to blow-dry my hair to make the curls large and wavy. Except for Mrs. Plotkin, I don't think I'd ever loved a female person as much in my life as I had loved Crystal then, unless it was Mama, long ago, whom I hardly remember.

“I should have c-called,” Crystal wept. “It's just so hard, Alice.”

“Oh, Crystal!” I said. “Lester really does like you.”

“‘Like' isn't enough,” Crystal said, and cried some more.

I was desperate. “He said he just can't give you up.”

Crystal stopped crying. “He
did
?”

I gulped. “I heard him say it. He said, ‘I just can't give her up.'”

“Are you sure it was
me
he was talking about?”

“Y-yes.”

“Oh, Alice, you don't know how happy you've made me.”

“Just a minute! I'll go get Lester,” I said quickly.

“No, no!
Please
don't get him. Don't even tell him I called. You told me all I need to know,” Crystal said. “G'night, love.” She made a kissing sound over the phone and hung up.

I felt terrible. I felt awful. I couldn't stand it. I marched across the hall and opened Lester's door.

“You stink!” I yelled.

Lester turned down his stereo. “What?”

And then I remembered it was his birthday. “Happy birthday,” I said.

“Oh,” said Lester, and turned the volume up again.

The next day, Saturday, Lester went to work at the appliance store, and I went to the Melody Inn, the music store, where Dad's the manager. I work there three hours every Saturday, helping out wherever Dad needs. On the way there, I was thinking how—when I left school on Friday—I'd thought I had the worst problems in the family because I was in the first seat in the front row in World Studies class, and how when I went to bed Friday night, I figured that Lester had a lot worse problems than I had. By the time I was through working my three hours at the Melody Inn, though, I knew it was Dad who had the most trouble of all.

There are two women who work at the Melody Inn—Janice Sherman, the assistant manager, who takes care of the sheet music department, and Loretta Jenkins, who runs the Gift Shoppe at the back of the store. Loretta chews gum and has wild curly hair, while Janice Sherman looks
and acts like a lady banker. She dresses in suits and scarves and has a smile that stretches just so far and no farther. She's also had a crush on my dad ever since we moved to Maryland, I think, and I'm not sure Dad knows it.

The worst part, though, is that she let us use her beach cottage at Ocean City for a week in August because I think she thought it would help Dad fall in love with her, even though she was back in Silver Spring minding the store. Instead, Dad fell for the lady in the beach house next to hers. And when I walked into the Melody Inn on this particular Saturday in early September, I had the feeling that somehow Janice had found out. I was assigned to help her in sheet music, and I happened to notice that she wasn't smiling at all. Her lips didn't even stretch.

“Check in this order, Alice,” she said, “and make sure that we got all five copies of Chopin's
Mazurkas
, eleven copies of Bach's
Preludes
, and all the single titles listed on this sheet. If they check out, then copy the prices on these stickers and put one on each piece of music.”

“Okay,” I told her, and waited for her to say, “How's school going?” or “How are things at your house?” or any of the other things she usually says to me on Saturdays. She didn't.

Here were Dad and Lester each involved in woman
troubles. I began to feel really lucky that Patrick and I were back to just being friends again, and I didn't have to worry about who to love first or best or most. Dad's problem, though, was that he didn't even know he had one. As far as Dad was concerned, Janice was just his assistant manager whom he took to concerts once in a while, but as far as Janice was concerned—I could see it in her eyes—she wanted to end up Mrs. Ben McKinley some day, only she never told Dad about it and he never guessed.

It's really awkward when you know something's wrong, but you can't talk about it. Janice Sherman was nice to me; she was just awfully quiet, as though her thoughts were a million miles away. Well, a hundred and fifty miles, anyway: Ocean City, Maryland. So after I got all the sheet music checked in and price stickers on everything and the music filed away in the drawer, I said, “It was really nice of you to let us use your beach cottage, Janice. We all had a really great time.”

“Apparently so,” said Janice, sort of sadly, I thought.

I knew I'd done it again. I considered putting a Band-Aid over my mouth to keep it shut until Monday morning so I couldn't do any more damage than I already had. But then I discovered that I could get in just as much trouble not saying anything at all. Because just before I went home
at noon, Janice said, “Well, I'm glad your family could use my cottage, Alice. It's a shame to let it sit there empty when someone could be enjoying it. Did you have any visitors?”

All sorts of alarms went off in my head, and I knew I'd have to be careful. I knew right away that she wondered if the woman next door had come over. The woman had, as a matter of fact, but she and Dad had stayed out on the front porch talking. She never came in.

“The only people we had overnight were friends of mine,” I told her.

“Well, sometimes it's nice just to have people in for dinner,” Janice said.

“Nope, just my friends,” I said, glad I could be honest. I sort of edged toward the door.

“Oh, what a shame!” said Janice. “What did your dad do all week? Swim a lot?”

“No, he doesn't swim much,” I said. “Mostly he just read and listened to music and stuff.” I knew it was the “and stuff” that bothered her.

“Just kept to himself with all those people around?” Janice kept quizzing me. “Never even went visiting once?”

How could I answer that? If I said yes, she'd want to know whom he visited, and she already suspected. If I said
no, I'd be lying. So I just didn't say anything. Not a word. I pretended I had a Band-Aid on my lips.

“I thought so,” said Janice quietly, and left the room.

Well, I told myself, she can be upset with me if she wants, but I'm not angry at her. Actually, I knew it wasn't me she was upset with, anyway, but Dad. Yet she couldn't tell him because he didn't suspect how she felt, and even if he did, he was her boss. So I could still say I had gone through my first week of seventh grade friends with everybody, the whole world.

I really liked the idea—getting through the year without a single enemy, everybody liking Alice McKinley. It would feel good not to have one person against me, like Pamela was for a while back in sixth grade when she had the leading role in the class play, I had to be the bramble bush, and I pulled her hair onstage. Or the way Elizabeth was mad at all of us for a while last summer when her boyfriend broke up with her and she felt left out. From now on I was going to try very, very hard to get along with absolutely everybody.

I had no idea, however, what was ahead.

 

THE FOLLOWING WEEKEND, ALL THREE OF
us—Pamela, Elizabeth, and I—were a little amazed we'd survived the first two weeks of junior high. After making the mistake the first day of asking a ninth grader where the girls' gym was and being sent to the faculty lounge, finding out that the signs had been reversed on the boys' and girls' restrooms up on second, and even after my falling down the stairs and sitting on a doughnut, we were still alive to talk about it.

“Let's have a sleepover,” Elizabeth said on the bus going home. And then, as soon as we nodded our heads, she added, “We had it at my house last time.”

“We had it at mine the time before,” Pamela reminded us.

There was only one possible response to that: “We can have it at mine,” I told them.

“For dinner or after?” Pamela asked.

“Dinner, of course,” I said.

The truth is that in the year since Dad and Lester and I had moved to Silver Spring, I'd never had my friends in for an overnight except for that one week at the ocean, but that was someone else's house. I knew that the girls wanted to sleep in
my
room, in
my
house, but our house isn't exactly the overnight kind.